In the mid 50s, scientists toyed with personal V2 Rockets as a mode of individual conveyance. This was taken from an ad for one of these early “Sky Scooters.”
The prototypes could certainly whisk mom to the market, but they invariably strayed off course, plunged into an adjacent lot, buried themselves 10 yards deep in the ground and exploded, distributing a gruesome shower of flesh and fashionable housecoat-scraps among a four-block radius. Worse, they had limited space for storing groceries. Eventually the boys in R & D figured out that women’s purses were playing havoc with the aerodynamic profile of the rockets - if the purse should come open, for example, the drag would pull the vehicle off course. Men’s hats had a similar effect, with the brim serving as an aileron.
This ad is meant to reassure the consumer that the bugs have been worked out - wear your hat! Bring your purse! But “Sky Scooters” never quite caught on with the general public, unless you consider define “caught on” as having a piece of flaming wreckage brush against your suit and cause it to “catch” on fire; under this definition, they most definitely caught on, especially at Modesto A&P, Saturday, April 1957, when 328 people “caught on.”
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