Los Angeles has always been short of water, and rarely more so than in the 1940s. In that decade, wartime industries boomed and the city’s population grew to nearly 2 million people. Water use shot up 59 percent. Construction engineer Sidney Cornell had a unique idea to fix the city’s water woes: hydro-cannons. The October 1951 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine included a drawing by legendary futurism illustrator Frank Tinsley that showed Cornell’s plan in action. As the magazine described, man-made geysers would shoot water from “the mouth of one into the funnel of the ... Read More
