Jammed into a seat in the economy class of an airbus, greedily sucking on sticky free coke and nibbling stale peanuts, with someone's elbow lodged in your ribs, you would probably think it ludicrous that Americans once believed flight would carry us to utopia.

Utopia. Not just an opportunity to fly to the coast for a sales meeting. But Utopia, defined in Webster's Collegiate, as "a place of ideal perfection."

During the technology craze of the early 20th Century, no invention held more mystical or spiritual promise for Americans than the airplane. There was something about separating from the earth that inspired a belief that flying was holy, or at least closer to the deity. After all, God was present in the heavens. A plane brought you into the heavens. Therefore, you were closer to God.

Historian Joseph Corn called it "The Prophetic Creed of Flight" in his 1983 book, The Winged Gospel. Corn quotes writer Mary Parker in a 1910 article describing a flight over Chicago: "Not a man but felt that this was the beginning of such a mighty era that no tongue could tell its import, and those who gazed felt awestruck, as though they had torn aside the veil of the future and looked into the very Holy of Holies...".

Evangelists even traveled the country preaching on the airplane and its relationship to God. Some believed that if you waited long enough, the airplane would eventually turn you into a sort of god. Alfred Lawson, an eccentric former baseball player, claimed in a 1916 book that within 8,000 years, a race of "Alti-men" would live in the heavens. Alti-men would be ethereal and would "swim" and farm in the skies. Alti-man's counterpart, "Ground-man" would live "at the bottom of the atmospheric sea like a crab or an oyster."

Lawson also believed, according to Corn, that time spent in the air was healing. Other commentators foresaw the use of airborne hospitals "where the sick and the suffering will be carried and nursed back to health," Corn wrote.

The most repeated, yet unfulfilled prediction of the era was that everyone would own a personal airplane. Alexander Graham Bell himself predicted in 1909 that the age of the aircar was just around the corner. A typical promotion for the personal plane promised "an airplane in every garage." Terms were invented like "roadable," [describing a plane that could be converted to a car] and "personal heliocopter." The "Airphibian" [a plane/auto] made it into the trial stage. As late as 1951, Popular Mechanics published a cover depicting a helicopter in a family's garage. Planners even devised gigantic urban terminals for solo air commuters.

The design of mass transportation aircraft was equally fantastic. These resembled airborne ocean liners, with massive propellers and balloons to carry them aloft. One such machine-- Norman Bel Geddes' 1929 boomerang-shaped Transoceanic Passenger Plane-- would have carried 451 passengers, in addition to a crew of 155, including nine bar stewards, seven musicians, a nurse, and a masseuse.

The reality of air travel, of course, was entirely different, but then, people had been screwing up predictions about human flight for hundreds of years. Beginning with Leonardo Da Vinci in 1500 and stretching through 1890, thinkers and engineers believed a flying machine would mimic the motions of a bird, down to the flapping wings.

Even Orville and Wilbur Wright, the inventors of the airplane, had trouble predicting the future of flight. Orville maintained in 1917-- despite three years of raging dogfights in Europe-- that flight would ultimately make wars impossible.

This view was shared by Octave Chanute, a railroad engineer with a mystical view of flight who aided the Wrights in their efforts. Chanute wrote in 1894 that he hoped "the advent of a successful flying machine" would hasten "the era in which there shall be nothing but peace and good will among all men."

Chanute also maintained that planes wouldn't be "efficient in attacks on hostile ships and fortifications," nor could they be relied on to "drop explosives with great accuracy." The ultimate effect of flight, Chanute claimed, would be to "diminish greatly the frequency of wars and to substitute some more rational methods of settling international misunderstandings."

Despite that lofty hope, airplanes became carriers of the most lethal killing tools ever devised. See: Dresden; Hiroshima; Vietnam; Bagdhad.

These days, you hear people making a lot of the same predictions about cyberspace as those made about the airplane. It's the birth of a new world. It'll bring people together. It'll bring world peace.
Even: it'll bring you closer to God.

Well, at least no one's jamming an elbow in your ribs.