Walt Disney was always fascinated with future technology and what it would be like and its effect on people all over the world.

By today’s standards, the technology with which Walt Disney made his name looks primitive: thousands of individual hand-drawn frames assembled into a film running at 24 frames per second.  I

n 1937, Walt Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. his first feature-length animation which had been  widely referred to as Disney’s Folly because it seemed too ambitious to work.

They were proved very wrong on this one.

Walt Disney was also fascinated by trains – this must have come from his upbringing in the mid West of America. He later built a very large and elaborate railway in his garden at his home in the Holmby Hills in Hollywood.

ABOVE – Bill McAlpine’s Railway with stations at Fawley Hill nr Henley on Thames – Walt Disney would have loved this

That just does reminds me of the Railway in  an English garden – at the home of the late Bill McAlpine at Fawley Hill near Henley on Thames – which my wife and I were lucky enough to visit on the occasion of an Open Day a few years ago, Wonderful day. This was on a scale that would be greeted with astonishment had you not seen it – a full size railway along with stations

Aside from pushing the filmmaking technology of his time, Walt Disney was fascinated in what future technology would be like and how it would change the lives of regular people. His most detailed predictions come from a letter he wrote in 1956.

Walt speculated that “the extension of radar and other as-yet untapped sources of cosmic force” would change everything, and in fact that is what has happened with the Internet.

We can only imagine how amazed  Walt Disney would be by the power of the smartphones we carry in our pockets, but he certainly realised that there’d be ever-increasing needs for power. 

The world’s first nuclear power plant was opened in the UK in 1956, so it makes sense that Walt would expect it to become a major power source – and it has. Our harnessing of solar power has become a very key area as a source of heating and electricity generation.

As well as speculating about future tech, Walt was prepared to back this financially. Rather than just a theme park, his original plan for the Floridian Disney World was to create an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

We now know it as Epcot. Epcot was intended to be a living, working city that was a blueprint for how American cities could evolve into cleaner, safer places.

ABOVE – Disneyland