Was the de Havilland Comet the most beautiful airliner ever built? Even today, it looks sleek and futuristic, the flowing lines of the wings expanding to contain the four jet engines. G-ALYP, the first production Comet, went into service in 1951. It was the world’s first passenger jet. And it was British. The future, it seemed, belonged to us.

This mood of national optimism as the country rebuilt and reshaped itself after the Second World War was embodied in the character and spirit of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, who made his debut in 1950 in the Eagle comic. On Wednesday he is being pressed into service once more as the frontman for a new exhibition at the Science Museum in London, Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain.

“It wasn’t just the art but the spirit behind the Eagle, which was an improving spirit,” says Professor Andrew Nahum, a curator of the show. “This was what resonated with what Britain thought it was about.”

“The national confidence in the early 1950s was sky-high,” adds the co-curator John Liffen. “We had seen a new Queen crowned, conquered Everest. There was a boundless sense of confidence, of what might be achieved.”

The exhibition recreates this explosion of activity in three sections. First comes Dan Dare, with its vision of a Utopian future, a society completely unafflicted by internal malaise. Some of Liffen’s own collection of Eagle comics, dating back to his boyhood, will be on display, along with original artwork boards. His enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. “

The Eagle was founded by Marcus Morris,” he explains, “a Southport vicar who started a national parish magazine called the Anvil, through which he was introduced to a very talented local artist named Frank Hampson. In response to what they saw as a threat from horror comics from the United States, the pair wanted to make something that children would want to buy and parents would want them to read. Something thoroughly entertaining, but with a moral consistency, not overly religious but with an ethical viewpoint, a world where violence would be minimal.”

Square-jawed space hero Dan Dare was the answer, and in Hampson’s extraordinarily detailed illustrations, one sees both the 1950s and the future. The Skylon tower, which was erected on the south bank of the Thames for the Festival of Britain in 1951, was pure Dan Dare. So, too, are the modern landmarks the London Eye and 30 St Mary Axe, better known as the Gherkin. And where did the idea for the driverless Docklands Light Railway come from?

The boys who grew up reading Dan Dare became the men who built the country we live in today and, consciously or not, they seem to have taken some of those Hampson illustrations with them into adulthood, along with the idea that nothing was impossible.

And in the 1950s, it seemed, nothing was. Using suitable illustrations from Dan Dare, the Science Museum exhibition then shifts focus on to two fronts: the home consumer and the wider world of industry. The domestic consumer boom was the first that Britain had experienced.

“When you bought a television set in 1955,” says Nahum, “it was probably the first one you had owned. The same for washing machines. Also, the chances are that it was built not too far away from where you lived. These were the luxury items of the day. Affordable, but only just.”

A section of the exhibition, entitled “Murphy, not Sony”, recalls those days before Britain opened itself up to imports, and with a series of contemporary Daily Mirror headlines, takes us back to a time when everything in your home and garage was made in Britain.

This was, of course, possible only because of the huge manufacturing capacity and expertise that the war years had left behind, and this is the third and final section of the exhibition. From this distance, it’s hard to imagine the flurry of activity and change that typified the 1950s. There was a new National Health Service to equip with large items such as X-ray tables and smaller ones such as spectacles, hearing aids and new drugs such as penicillin. All of these items are on display, and the X-ray table in particular is a formidable piece of engineering. Shorn of the soft edges of today’s equipment, it is a lumbering piece of high technology constructed out of solid steel, with no attempt made to hide the screws and handles that hold it together.

The same rugged confidence was on display everywhere. “Renovating Britain wasn’t just about radar and penicillin,” Nahum says. “It was about renovating older industry and giving it a new lease of life.” Innovative cars, such as the rear-engined Hillman Imp on display here, were being designed and produced in Britain, although government insistence on building the car in Scotland, rather than Coventry, where it was designed, ultimately undermined it. The Imp had a poor reputation for reliability and the company was sold to the American giant Chrysler.

The railways, too, were in for a brighter future. “100mph trains for Britain!” screams a Daily Mirror headline, and elsewhere, inspired by the example of the Comet, the aviation industry was soaring ahead. A film of the 1958 Farnborough air show reveals a host of domestic manufacturers, including Fairey, whose Rotodyne combination helicopter-cum-aeroplane was the first aeroplane capable of vertical take-off and landing.

Which brings us back to the de Havilland Comet. G-ALYP crashed off the Italian island of Elba in 1954, in one of a spate of mysterious mid-air calamities to befall the aircraft. An inquiry eventually traced a fault in the plane to rivets in the square windows, which over time were producing cracks in the fuselage, causing the aircraft to disintegrate in mid-air.

A fragment of G-ALYP is on display in the Science Museum, the first time it has been seen for more than 50 years. It’s a poignant reminder of a Britain that might have been. Although the Comet was revised (a version of it is still in service with the RAF), public confidence was never regained, and American companies such as Boeing were able to use the inquiry’s freely available findings to avoid similar catastrophe in their own aircraft.

All passenger aircraft today have rounded windows, thanks to the Comet. Britain’s loss of its lead in aircraft manufacturing was the price it paid for being a pioneer, and one can still feel the loss of confidence that such incidents produced whenever one travels by our very much sub-100mph trains.

Even Dan Dare would eventually lose his lustre, his vision of an ideal society dying with our own. The children of the future would henceforth grow up on the murderous Judge Dredd and 2000AD. Perhaps we get the heroes we deserve.

Or perhaps our modern negativity is too deeply ingrained. “People forget,” Nahum says, “that this country is still the sixth-largest manufacturing nation in the world, and that we are still very strong in creative industries and design. Britain is still a place where the future is imagined into being.”

Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain, Science Museum, London SW7 (www.sciencemuseum.org.uk 0870 8704868), from Weds, until Oct 2009

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