The Human Drift

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The Human Drift is a utopian book by King Camp Gillette, first published in 1894. It argues that competitive corporations should be replaced by a single large publicly owned company called the United Company to fix most social problems.

A big part of the book imagines a giant city called Metropolis at Niagara Falls. It would house tens of millions of people and get electricity from the Falls, using the new alternating current technology. The Falls photo is used as the frontispiece.

Metropolis would have a perfect system of production and distribution run by the United Company, and would be the only city of its kind in North America. With economies of scale, there would be one of every essential factory (one steel mill, one shoe factory, etc.), and advances in machinery would bring greater wealth for everyone. Social progress would be natural, and gender equality would be the rule.

Gillette gives a detailed plan: the city would be a perfect rectangle, 135 miles long and 45 miles wide. Outside Metropolis, most of North America would stay as natural land. He thought the city could hold the United States’ population of about 60 million at the time, with room for 30 million more in the future. Buildings would be porcelain for durability and cleanliness, inspired by the White City from the 1893 World’s Fair. He favored circular buildings (even 25-story apartments) and a hexagonal street layout. In later versions, he shifted to circular shapes and raised apartments to 50 stories.

The book includes many illustrations, a graph called the Educational and Industrial Pyramid, and other features. It was influential in its time, but today it is often seen as a curiosity.

Gillette continued to share similar ideas in later books, World Corporation (1910) and The People’s Corporation (1924). Other works also supported his views.

No Metropolis was ever built, but the Niagara Falls area did see a planned community: Echota, a workers’ town designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1891 and built by the Niagara Falls Power Company.