Gleaming rockets and autogyros abound in a shiny, efficient world that's just around the corner; automobile and airplane manufacturers muse about solar power and the future, while we learn about the deep sea diving bells we'll be riding the other way - into the stratosphere. It's just the sort of retro science fiction science almost-fact that you needed after a hard day of looking for a job during the Depression years, and here it is - enjoy it!

Back in the 1920's and 1930's, America was still largely rural. The flight to the cities was in full force by the Depression years, but even when they were on the move, these new urbanites were still farmers and the families of farmers. They were used to making their own goods and repairing their own equipment - and the core technologies of that period - the internal combustion engine and the radio, for example - were both relatively simple and general. If you could build a boat, you could probably build an car or an airplane. Or anyway, you thought you could.

This was the magazine for you.

Modern Mechanix & Inventions was one of many long-gone magazines for the home tinkerer. It's full of designs for little devices, bigger devices, and even the cars, boats and airplanes mentioned above. It seems as though anyone who could maintain a Model T Ford was able to take a couple of old condensers and a coil and, at the end of the weekend, have an electric-eye-guided vacuum cleaner with, probably, a snowplow welded on the side.

At the same time, the magazine's covers had a wonderful stretch in the mid-30's when they showed amazing, impossible, and unlikely machines that we were just about almost ready to build, like the spinning top plane, the great wheeled ocean liner, or the dirigible airfield. The art on these covers, with its bright palette of orange and red contraptions against green and purple, hazy backdrops, must have caught the eyes and nickels of those inventors who were also reading Buck Rogers on Sunday and listening to his adventures in the evening on the radio.

We're betting that they'll still do something like that for you today.