On Engineered Wonder

In the wake of my recent (and inaugural) visit to Disneyland, I read Richard Snow’s history of the park, Disney’s Land. Early in the book, Snow tells a story that I hadn’t heard before. It fascinated me—not just for its details, but also, as I’ll soon elaborate, for its potential relevance to our current moment.

The tale begins in 1948. According to Snow, Disney’s personal nurse and informal confidant, Hazel George, had become worried. “[She] began to sense that her boss was sinking into what seemed to her to be a dangerous depression,” Snow writes. “Perhaps even heading toward what was then called a nervous breakdown.” 

The sources of this distress were obvious. Disney’s studio hadn’t had a hit since Bambi’s release in 1942, and the loss of the European markets during the war, as well as the economic uncertainty that followed in peacetime, had strained the company’s finances. Meanwhile, during this same period, Disney faced an animator strike that he took as a personal betrayal. “It seemed again to just be pound, pound, pound,” writes Snow. “Disney was often aggressive, abrupt, and when not angry, remote.”

Hazel George, however, had a solution. She knew about Disney’s childhood fascination with steam trains, so it caught her attention when she saw an advertisement in the paper for the Chicago Railroad Fair, which would feature exhibits from thirty different railway lines built out over fifty acres on the shore of Lake Michigan. She suggested Disney take a vacation to  see the fair. He loved the idea.

In Chicago, entranced by what he encountered, Disney felt a spark of the creative enthusiasm that had been missing throughout the war years. He just needed to find a way to harness it. Serendipitously, upon returning to Los Angeles, one of his animators, Ward Kimball, introduced him to a group of West Coast train enthusiasts who were building scale models of functioning steam trains large enough for an adult to ride on (think: cars roughly the length of a child’s wagon).

This, Disney decided, is what he needed to do.

In 1949, Disney and his wife, Lillian, bought a five-acre plot of land on Carolwood Drive in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of LA, to build a new house. They chose the location in large part because Disney thought its layout would be perfect for his own scale railroad project. 

Over the next year, he worked with the machine shops at his studio to help construct his scale trains and with a team of landscapers to build out the track and its surroundings. When complete, Disney’s Carolwood Pacific Railroad, as he called it, included a half-mile of right-of- way that circled the house and yard, including a 46-foot-long trestle bridge and a 90-foot-long tunnel dug under his wife’s flower bed—complete with an S-turn shape so that you couldn’t see the other end upon entering. His rolling stock included his 1:8 scale steam locomotive, called the Lilly Belle, six cast-metal gondolas, two boxcars, two stock cars, a flatcar, and a wooden caboose decorated inside with miniature details like a twig-sized broom and tiny potbelly stove that could actually be lit.

As Snow tells it, this project re-energized Disney. The more he worked on the line, the more ideas began to flow for his company. Soon, one such idea began to dominate all the others. In 1953, Disney abruptly shut down the Carolwood Pacific. It had accomplished its goal of helping him rediscover his creative inspiration, but now he had a bigger project to pursue; one that would dominate the final chapter of his career and provide him endless fascination and enthusiasm: he would build a theme park.

As Snow concludes: “Of all the influences that helped shape Disneyland, the railroad is the seminal one. Or, rather, a railroad. One Disney owned.”

~~~

My term for what Disney achieved in building the Carolwood Pacific Railroad is engineered wonder. More generally, engineered wonder is when you take something that sparks a genuine flare of interest, and you pursue it to a degree that’s remarkable (or, depending on who you ask, perhaps even absurd). Such projects are not done for money, or advancement, or respect, but instead just because they fascinate you, and you want to amplify that feeling as expansively as possible.

This brings me back to my promised connection to our current moment. In the early 1950s, Disney deployed engineered wonder to escape the creativity-sapping economic doldrums created by wartime uncertainty. Seventy-five years later, I see a more widely relevant use for this strategy: escaping the digital doldrums created by mediating  too many of our experiences through screens.

I increasingly worry that as we live more and more of both our personal and professional lives in the undifferentiated abstraction of the digital, we lose touch with what it’s like to grapple with the joys and difficulties of the real world: to feel real awe, or curiosity, or fascination, and not just an algorithmically-optimized burst of emotion; to see our intentions manifest concretely in the world, and not just mechanically measured by view counts and likes.

Engineered wonder offers an escape from this state. It reawakens our nervous systems to what it’s like to engage with the non-digital. It teaches our brains to crave the real sensations and reactions that our screens can only simulate. It’s a way to jumpstart a more exciting chapter in our lives.

During Disney’s era, the Carolwood Pacific Project likely seemed extreme to most people he encountered. Today, this extremeness might be exactly what we need.

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