Headscratchers / Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

• Why didn't anyone recognize the people in the glass elevator? Charlie had been featured in the morning papers because he found the golden ticket, and maybe some of the papers showed his parents and grandparents as well. And just a few hours earlier, a large crowd of people saw Mr. Wonka open the gates of the factory to welcome the children in.
  • That's explained in the novel itself: All the people who saw the Elevator on TV only saw it at a distance because the cameras couldn't zoom in too closely. The people inside were not only too small to make out clearly, but also slightly blurred by the glass of the Elevator, so they were impossible to identify. The only ones who did get a good look at them were the astonauts at the Space Hotel... and they had been in space for a while and probably hadn't read the latest newspapers, so it's quite understandable that they wouldn't recognize Willy Wonka, Charlie or any of the others. When they try to describe the people in the Elevator for Ground Control and President, the descriptions sound so ludicrous that nobody believes them (the Ground Control draws the conclusion that the "old people" and the "little boy" are spies in disguise, and the President draws the conclusion that the bed is a bomb in disguise.)
  • On top of that, keep in mind that this novel is set in the 1950s; taking into account that Charlie only discovered his ticket the day before, it's not unreasonable to assume that America hasn't had a chance to see any pictures of the Buckets or Wonka that would help them realise who they're looking at.
  • The novel's actually set in 1972, as stated when they're working out Grandma Georgina's greatly advanced age.

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