The Weekly Thread · 01
Nobody had drawn a spaceship, a ray gun or a city in the sky before 1926. Then one Austrian draughtsman painted all of them, once a month, on newsstand deadlines, for a magazine that cost a quarter. Six covers by Frank R. Paul, the man who invented what the future looks like.
This is the first of a weekly series: one subject from the archive, a handful of its best images at full size, and a link to the longer piece for anyone who wants the whole story. Every image below is a public domain scan from the Internet Archive, dated and matched to the story it illustrated using the caption the magazine itself printed.
The Death of the Moon
Read the caption the magazine printed and the picture flips. The insects are scientists from the Moon, arrived on Earth that day. We are the monsters. The red beam comes from a ray gun in a lunar hand, not from the animal. Nearly every repost of this cover online has it backwards.
The War of the Worlds
Wells had published the novel thirty years earlier. This is one of the first colour paintings anyone made of the fighting machines, and the shape Paul settled on, black, insectile, striding through its own fires, is still the tripod most people picture.
Radio Mates
A matter transmitter, painted in 1927. Look where he put it: not a laboratory or a launch pad but a parlour, with a rug and a lace collar. In Paul’s future the machines arrive indoors.
Cities in the Air
New York, airborne and steerable, kept aloft by cosmic rays, with an electrostatic tower in the middle to power it. Gernsback never let a picture go out without an explanation of how it worked.
To the Moon by Proxy
A remote-operated body, sent to the Moon so that a person does not have to go. We call it telepresence now. In 1928 the way to prove it worked was to make it fight a lion.
Into the Subconscious
Those brass domes are not helmets and there is nobody inside them. Each has a television screen set into the front, and it is broadcasting a memory. The left one is showing a dinosaur. A painting of a memory on television, made in 1929.
The whole story
These six are drawn from a longer piece with eleven covers, the magazine’s own “Our Cover” notes for each one, Paul’s route from radio diagrams to Amazing Stories, and three covers that get confidently credited to him online and were painted by somebody else. Frank R. Paul: The Man Who Invented What the Future Looks Like.
Scans: Internet Archive. All covers are in the public domain. The Weekly Thread runs every Tuesday; the same six images go out on Threads, Instagram, Bluesky and Pinterest the same day.
Atomic Daydream 
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