We live in a time when technology is rapidly developing, changing one another, new professions appear, and old ones disappear… We look to the future with hope and apprehension, it seems that humanity has never experienced anything like this before. But is it really so?
It is interesting to compare the ideas about the future of people who lived more than a hundred years ago with our present. Old postcards help us to do this. They show how people of the 19th century imagined life in the 21st century.
In the nineteenth century, science and technology developed very rapidly. People learned about electricity, automobiles, cameras, telephones, and began using radio waves. This inspired them to create new technologies. Steam engines and futuristic carriages appeared on the streets. Some scientists even talked about the possibility of creating a “perpetual motion” engine. Advances in technology stimulated the imagination of engineers, scientists, artists, and other creative people of the time.
In 1900 Hildebrands published a series of postcards in which illustrators presented their vision of life in the year 2000. They envisioned that technological advances would bring new conveniences, especially in transportation. One of the illustrations depicted an exquisite airplane, while another showed a mechanism that moved sidewalks effortlessly for pedestrians.
In 1910, Jean-Marc Côté and his team of illustrators produced a set of drawings called “En L’An 2000” (“In the Year 2000” in French). Their postcards also offered interesting insights into the future.
I would like to select some of them and consider the most interesting specimens.
Artificial wings
Flying is one of the greatest human desires. The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a time of intense search for ways to take to the air with the help of devices different from the then known balloon. Recall that the Wright brothers did not make their first flight until 1903.
What about today? Airplanes are our everyday life, but they are more like “flying buses” than personal wings. Here rather hang gliders are closer to what people imagined in the old days, but they also don’t give you as much freedom as shown in the picture above. The closest thing to such a concept is… a jetpack! This device has already been extensively tested and presented at various events around the world. Will any of us ever use it? I’d love to see!
Motor house
Can’t sit still? Do you need constant change? That’s what people who lived over 100 years ago thought, and they designed motorhomes especially for you. Now you can wake up every day with a completely different view outside your window.
The idea has already been realized in the form of houses on wheels – apartment cars, in which you can live quite normally, if you regularly replenish water supplies and dispose of waste. The idea of an entire building on wheels is somewhat problematic, however, because we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere on modern roads with such a wide vehicle.
Moving sidewalk
A hundred years ago, in the big cities of Europe and the United States, the nobility was very fond of just walking around the city, socializing and exchanging information. A kind of Facebook in our time.
But they thought that it was necessary to improve this process, to invent some means of transportation that would facilitate such movement around the city. So, one of the ideas for transportation solutions were sidewalk-platforms that would cross cities, making it easier for people to communicate. That might make sense, but the version with benches and a roof over them looks even better, only then it would appear that we just invented… the tram.
However, movable sidewalks have still found reasonable uses, such as in subways, airports and shopping malls, where they have the appearance of escalator belts on which we can move between floors with heavy luggage.
Looking at these pictures, you can’t help but think how far people are sometimes in their ideas about the future from the real development of technology and society. It is enough to look at what people are wearing in these pictures.
I don’t think our thinking has fundamentally changed since those times. Remember at least the Terminator, which predicted a kind of the end of the world in 1997, or the movie Back to the Future 2 with flying cars by 2015. Something to think about…
