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M$5 January 20, 2009 03:25 AM

How correct were these 1910 predictions about 2000?

"Days of Future Past":
In 1910 a Frenchman painted several images of what he believed the year 2000 held in store.  Some of them he got pretty much spot-on in a steampunk-ish sort of way.

For example this one:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSU7qUY0AI/AAAAAAAABDY/IoXfHfRQfu4/s1600/Correspondence%2BCinema%2B-%2BPhonograph%2B-%2BTelegraphic.jpg

... is pretty much the steampunk version of this:

http://www.macwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/Picture%204.jpg

Here is a link to the full collection:
http://www.paleofuture.com/2007/09/french-prints-show-year-2000-1910.html

My Question:How much of this do you think he got right?  Why or why not?  Discuss.  Best pictures and most well-considered scholarly answers get the win
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January 22, 2009 10:02 AM
Many things we have today were pretty much inconceivable in 1910. To quote the somewhat recently passed Arthur C Clarke, "Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.". In 1910, plastic as we know it today did not exist, synthetic fabrics, or, frankly, much of what we use today. So we need to consider that 90-100 years is a tremendous duration when it comes to judging this kind of thing - and consider that these concepts are based in tech from 1910, not 1940 or 1970.

It has also been said that technology advances far more than we expect it to in ten years, but it's easy to overestimate where we'll be in 50. This is a notion I don't particularly disagree with, though today we have a better sense of the speed of advancement...

Car shoes? Perhaps absurd - but I think the main concept here is compact, portable transportation for modest distances...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSUPaUYz-I/AAAAAAAABDI/OHA79Khd-WI/s1600-h/Car-Shoes+With+Roues.jpg

While not utterly compact, we have such things today...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SegwayTour.JPG

So - a wild miss on the implementation, but score a hit for the concept he had.

Electric train?
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSWhKUY0MI/AAAAAAAABE4/mPNl_qvq20c/s1600-h/The+electric+train+Paris+Peijing.jpg

Well, I don't think he could've known that magnetic levitation would be en vogue so far into the future, but it's an otherwise sound concept that has been put to use in the past.

Hearing the newspaper?
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSVB6UY0BI/AAAAAAAABDg/9V2TvJTcRM8/s1600-h/Hearing+of+the+Newspaper.jpg

Well, it's an interesting, archaic, perspective of something that has come to fruition... over eight decades ago. Radio. For the modern equivalent, you could equate it to a podcast. Again, while the concept of the transmission medium here is utterly ridiculous, the idea of listening to the news isn't.

Some of these are hilarious. Cars of war?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSUZqUYz_I/AAAAAAAABDQ/n0B2GHiNh_M/s1600-h/Cars+of+War.jpg

Well, we do have such things. But, it was but ONE year later that the first usable tanks were created:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank

Seems he was off by 89 years.

The school one is... interesting. As computers and televisions hadn't been invented, and this gentleman didn't have full foresight, the idea that people would be taught via audio is nothing but correct, but books have not left us and won't be anytime soon. As with the others, the implementation he has is archaic.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSSRaUYz8I/AAAAAAAABC4/WiaKbdhqWRE/s1600-h/At+the+School.jpg

All in all, can we say that he was close on a couple things? Sure, given what people had knowledge of at the time - but these concepts are stuck in the technology of the day, with leaps in to fantasy to meet the author's other concepts of what the future would be like.

All in all, taken as a piece of whimsy, this is pretty neat, but, otherwise, isn't that much different than what was in the science fiction of the day.

Here's some science fiction from 1911:
http://www.amazon.com/Ralph-124C-41-Frontiers-Imagination/dp/0803270984

Granted, it took place in 2660, but this book roughly represents the far reaches of the predictive capabilities that we humans have when looking at the future - whatever we are trying to predict, there will always be something that turns out nothing like we expect - and if it turns out being important (radio, TV, computers, proliferation and domination of automobiles), then whatever was predicted is going to look dated.


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January 20, 2009 10:04 AM
I am not impressed. The cards are from 1910 and don't really get beyond WWI ideas (1914 to 1917). For instance, the armored cars and airships are WWI technology. The other ideas are off base. He saw communication in terms of the recently invented phonographs, but thought people would mail them back and forth, and that they would be improved with pictures. You could do that today with home recorded cds but no one does. Society went in a different direction springing from the telephone. The idea of everyone flying around cities is still a far off dream, if it is possible at all. He seems to have misunderstood how the early airplanes worked, sort of mixing them up with balloons. The motorized roller skates and the radioactive fireplace are impossibly dangerous notions. The cards were probably intended to be amusing rather than serious predictions.

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