Card of the Day - 2023-02-23

echte wagner Zukunftsfantasien
Echte Wagner [trade : margarine : O/S : Germany] "Zukunftsfantasien"/ "Imaginings of the Future" (1930) Album Nr. 3, Serie 12, Bild 2

Now this is a very intriguing set and you can see the rest of the cards, enlarged as well, at RareHistoricalPhotos/Germany. The same page also deals with set thirteen, as an added bonus.

Now you may think that this is the first monorail, but actually they had been known for a while - they were first used in England, in 1824, within the docks at Deptford. However this was purely for freight. It must have caught someone`s imagination though, as the following year a similar craft was built in Cheshunt, and that did carry passengers. It seems likely that the one on this card was suggested by the monorails of the 1920s, in nearby Russia. And perhaps seeing this card put the idea into the head of the governor of New York City, who planned to construct one there. However it was never built. 

One of the most interesting things to me about this card is the aeroplane at top just left of the middle, which features on its own card as well. This seems to bear all the hallmarks of the "Flying Wing"  a futuristic craft that Germany experimented with in the 1920s, almost certainly as a result of early work by Hugo Junkers, who had planned one and patented it in 1910, though it was never built, because it fell foul of the after war aircraft restrictions that were meted out to Germany as a punishment. He thought it could carry hundreds if not thousands of passengers, revolutionising civilian travel. Like the monorail, a flying wing type craft was tested and built in Russia. These were primarily gliders, because that was the only kind of aircraft that Germany was legally allowed to build. The most famous builders were the Hortens, whose craft this card was almost certainly based on. However though it was produced in the 1940s it never flew until almost the end of the war and was found to be dangerously unstable.

The word `Echte` is sometimes given as part of the company name but it is not, it just means "genuine". The company name is Holsteinische Pflanzenbutterfabriken Wagner & Co., and it was started by Carl Wagner in 1907 in Elmshorn in Germany. Strangely, because these sets all mention kind, vegan, things like Pflanzebutter (butter made of plants, or margarine) it started as a pork butcher, selling hams and sausages.

It closed in 1976.