The Monsantos House of the Future!
Some of you have heard of it.
Some of you have been there!
What was it and more importantly, did it live up to its name?
In June of 1957 Disneyland opened the Monsanto House of the Future right at the front of Tomorrowland.
It was a project primarily developed by architectural and engineering faculty from MIT, and the
chemical company, Monsanto.
It was, as the name implies, a house of the future you could walk through.
But you see Monsanto didn’t want just any old house of the future.
They wanted a house of the future that focused on one thing.
Just one thing.
Plastics.
There was a great future in plastics.
Today for many of us of a certain age or younger, it seems crazy, but in the late 1950’s the
plastic industry was still coming of age.
It wasn’t new by any stretch, but the real explosion of plastic manufacturing didn’t
happen until after World War 2 was over.
It was this perfect merging of the development of new plastics along with the industrial
power that was developed during the war.
And so Monsanto wanted a plastic house of the future, and that’s just what they got.
The House of the Future was designed to give guests a peek at what life might be like in
just ten years time.
So what was in this plastic house of the future, and how much of it ended coming true?
Let’s start in the kitchen.
First up cooking food.
According to the House of the Future, food would be cooked rapidly in ovens that utilized
microwave technology.
Sounds about right.
Microwaves did exist for a decade by that point, but they stood at around 6 feet tall,
weighed 750 pounds, and cost, in today’s dollar, around $55,000.
So a home kitchen microwave was still a dream, but it’s one that ultimately came true by
the late 1960s.
The kitchen would also feature an ultrasonic dishwasher, which would essentially use high
frequency sound waves to agitate water which would in-turn clean the dishes.
This technology exists today, but it’s largely used on an industrial and professional scale.
Not to much in the average home.
The home also sported a touch-tone telephone with hands-free speakers.
The concept pre-dates the House of the Future, however it wouldn’t really find its way
to the masses until 1963 when Bell Systems would display their first touch-tone phone
at the Seattle World’s Fair.
This one is interesting.
They were right, touch-tone phones did become commonplace in homes of the future.
However that’s changing again.
According to the center for disease control, which oddly tracks phone ownership, less than
50% of American households currently have a landline telephone, and that number keeps dropping.
As for lighting, the House of the Future featured lights that you could dim to a level you preferred.
Again, this was an instance where the technology existed long before the attraction opened,
but wasn’t really popular for use in homes yet.
It would be the Lutron Electronics Company in 1961 that would invent a dimmer based on
a diode and a autotransformer, allowing the dimmer to be installed in a normal wallbox.
Today I wouldn’t go as far as to say every home has dimmable lights, but it's common enough
that I’d give them the point.
Some other features of the house included flat screen televisions, which are fairly
common today.
Retractable hanging “cold zone” refrigeration spaces.
Uh, not so much.
Room specific climate control.
It exists.
Room specific smell control.
No, unless you count those glade plugins or something.
Wall security with CCTV that show you your front door.
I mean this one exists. It's not everywhere, but it’s not rare either.
Sinks with motorized height adjustment for children.
This one actually exists as well. It's mainly for accessibility, but it’s definitely not something that I
would say is commonplace in the modern home.
Then of course there’s the plastic home itself.
Smooth, shiny, plastic walls, floors and roofs.
Sure we might utilize plastic in building homes, but this?
No.
Obviously the biggest failure of the House of the Future, which ends up being the biggest
failure when it comes to most of these “of the Future” showcases, is the aesthetics.
Can’t really blame them though.
Sometimes it’s hard enough to guess where stylistic taste is going in the next year
or two, let alone the next decade or two.
Perhaps my most favorite miss when it comes to the House of the Future though is, well,
the house itself.
You see, beyond being a showcase for plastics, the Monsanto House of the Future was an example
of modular construction.
The idea was that eight U-shaped plastic prefabricated units would be attached to a central core
unit, and then closed off with glass.
For the attraction it was built in a simple cross shape, but in theory you could mix and
match these core units with the prefab extensions to build all sorts of shaped and sized homes.
Since the same prefab extensions and cores could be built, and just rearranged, you could
lower the cost and effort of making a custom house.
Today it’s not the norm to build houses that way, but modular construction is occasionally used.
Funny enough it would be used over in Disney World to build the Contemporary and Polynesian
resorts, however it ultimately caused more trouble than it saved.
1967 eventually rolled around, marking the year the House of the Future was supposed
to predict.
Some of the technology by that point was indeed finding its way into homes and some was not.
In any case Monsanto shifted their attention to their new sponsored attraction in Tomorrowland,
Adventure Thru Inner Space, and the House of the Future would close that December.
For as fun as it is to look back on these predictions of the future and laugh at what
they got wrong, I love that they still exist.
That endless optimism of a better future is not only an ideal that Walt Disney followed
himself, but it’s one that pushes us all forward, even if we only get it right half the time.
If you would like to learn more about modular construction over at Walt Disney World
I have a video all about the Contemporary Resort and all of the issues that construction workers ran into
when trying to build it. Thank you all for watching, and I'll see you next time!