In 1967, attending the Montreal World's Fair was about the closest thing to stepping into the future. It was the last of the true "Grand Scale" world expositions, and celebrated Canada's 100th anniversary of confederation. It has never been equaled in size or scope. Perhaps Dubai may approach or even surpass the grand scale of Expo 67 in the year 2020 - but until then Expo 67 remains a pinnacle of visionary achievement and is still iconic to this very day.

 

Expo 67 gave us a happy glimpse of the near future - and how wonderful it was all going to be. In the future, everyone would live in energy efficient modular homes. Everyone would drive electric cars. Everyone in the world would be connected to a gigantic super-computer and everyone would have instant access to all man's accumulated information all the time. Commercial aircraft would be supersonic, and one could travel across the country or oceans in a couple of hours. Colonization of space was only a few decades away.

 

I visited Expo 67 with my family. We recorded some of the exposition on a handheld 8MM film camera, and I have posted this video on my "Coniston"

web page.

​

At the bottom of this page is an excellent quality Youtube home video in a remarkable state of preservation. This video is quite similar in content to what my family shot, and captures the energy and spirit of the time using far superior camera and film technology.

 

The summer of '67, the so called "Summer of Love", was a pivotal period of western social revolution. It was a musical renaissance, and maybe the last time our society had such widespread utopian aspirations. Within a year, the Vietnam war exploded with the Tết Offensive, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assasinated, and Richard Nixon took control to steer the USA into a long and painful industrial decline. It is true that man landed on the moon only a scant two years later, but humanity has never since committed to any further grand challenges of that scale, and who knows if and when we ever will.

 

The word we live in today somewhat resembles the lofty ideals, architectures and artistic infrastructure of Expo 67. We certainly have elegant modern building architectures, fast bullet trains, and large wall size televisions with hundreds of channels of entertainment. Automobiles are more beautiful, faster, much more fuel efficient than ever before. But we still stuggle with a host of chronic problems unforeseen in the 60's - including underemployment, a widening ecomomic gap between the top and bottom segments of  society, Global Warming, dwindling fossil fuels, Nuclear waste, radical religious motivated terrorism, corporate expansion by means of exploiting cheap overseas labor at the expense of legacy worker's jobs, and marvelous medical advances, but astonishingly poor personal health through the deterioration of the Standard American Diet, among many other challenges. Yes the future is quite different than we thought it would be. We still have a lot of work to get us to the world envisioned by the dreamers who brought us Expo 67, and hopefully we will get there some day.

 

Step back in time with me, to when the near future was a place that was guaranteed to hold a better life for all of mankind - where man would collectively overcome the mundane problems of feeding, clothing, housing, healing,  educating and employing the masses - and the human spirit was free to explore the arts and sciences without bounds. Buckle up. I'm going to send you back... to the future!