Miami, 1957: This Far-Out Futurist Had Some Ideas About Cars

Visionary Jacque Fresco had a lot of ideas about the future. One of them, the “Ultra“ automobile, never really got off the drawing board. But it looked great on the drawing board! The “Ultra“ had only thirty-parts and was designed to sell for seven hundred dollars. Fresco had apparently built -- or partially built -- a full-sized “Ultra“ about a decade before this clip hit WTVJ’s air in 1957. There’s no indication that the “Ultra“ ever got bigger than the model demonstrated in this story after that. Jacque Fresco claimed to have a PhD. He didn’t; there’s some question as to whether he attended any college. He did have a lot of ideas, from designs for a mass-produced house to the “Venus Project,“ a utopian settlement of four concrete dome structures in Venus Florida. Although his projects never got past the prototype stage, Fresco’s futurist ideas acquired a following. There’s a feature documentary about him, “Future By Design,“ now viewable on YouTube, along with a lot of intriguing material. Subscribe to the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives’ YouTube channel and tune in to the fascination and fun of Miami and Florida’s past, captured on film and video and preserved by the Wolfson Archives at Miami Dade College. This video and audio is copyrighted/owned by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives at Miami Dade College. This clip is derived from news film in the WTVJ Collection. Accession number TVN0329-1246-12; airdate May 29, 1957.