Cover Story: Bruce McCall’s “The World Tomorrow” (original) (raw)

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“Any common everyday object—my glasses, my cigar, my toothbrush—was an invention at some point,” Bruce McCall, the artist behind this week’s triptych cover, says. “There’s a first time for everything: not just for Galileo or Edison or my hero, Count Graf Zeppelin, but also for the hula hoop or the moment Bob Dylan starts picking on an electric guitar. I set all the innovations against the background of a nineteenth-century machine—first, because I love drawing machines, but also because machines are great metaphors for invention. We see the gears and the wheels and understand their connection to new ways of doing things. Machines are transparent about their inner workings—a quality that gets lost with today’s electronics.”

See below for details on the innovations Bruce McCall chose to include in his triptych.

Mina Kaneko is a former member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.