"It's 50 years this week that the first travelator opened in the UK, prompting visions of a future where walking would be superseded by standing on a moving walkway.
They belong to an age of hovercraft and monorails, a Tomorrow's World imagining of the 21st Century rooted firmly in the past.
Even their name - travelator! - evokes the sci-fi innocence of a post-war world which had not yet learned to be cynical about the transformative power of technology.
Once, the idea of automated moving walkways may have been bound up with gleaming, modernist idealisations of the future.
But after 50 years in the UK, most of us must now surely associate them with a brief moment of respite as we trudge from one end of an airport to another.
It was a very different story when the UK's first travelator opened in September 1960 - a time when the confident consumerism of Harold Macmillan's "never had it so good" era was preparing to give way to Harold Wilson's faith in the white heat of scientific development."
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