Scouring the recently-posted PopSci archives on Google Books, reader Wesley Treat has put together a collection documenting the magazine’s odd, decades-long obsession with the idea of a personal monowheel.
https://gizmodo.com/browse-the-popsci-and-popmech-archives-on-google-books-5105776
Just as vague questions of cosmology and consciousness make up just about every other cover of New Scientist today, fantastical futurist gadgets were at one point the safe default for the covers of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Like lots of the other cover staples, the monowheel has to some degree come to pass, but hardly to the extent that you might have been led to believe it might in 1917. Or 1923. Or 1938. You get the idea. [RoadsideResort]
