Gallery: Stanley Kubrick's Greatest Technological Innovations

Kubrick’s landmark “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) covers an awesome evolutionary sweep as it ranges from the “Dawn of Man” on the African plains to a 21st century computer-run spaceship — “Hello, HAL” — ferrying astronauts to the moon and later to Jupiter as they seek to unravel the mysteries of human existence. During pre-production Kubrick collected vast amounts of research on what life in space would be like in the near future, consulting the aerospace industry, university researchers and R&D labs. The idea of a rapidly spinning centrifuge that could harness centripetal force to maintain earthly levels of gravity was popular in space talk at the time, so Kubrick decided the film’s Discovery spaceship should prominently feature a copy. He hired Vickers Engineering Group to create a $300,000 imitation centrifuge (top rotational speed: 3 mph). The Ferris wheel-like set allowed Kubrick to film famous scenes that appear to show an astronaut jogging in a vertical circle or walking up the round sides of the ship. “Being a production designer, I’ve always felt that the centrifuge was so far ahead of its time and still is, and I admire the intense research Kubrick did to commit to build it, and simultaneously the camera and playback systems that had to be adapted in order to shoot it,” Podesta says. “I still watch those images on the centrifuge in awe.”