We were always this future-obsessed. Take electricity, for example, arguably the most significant innovation of the late 1800s. In 1883 Darmstadt University of

We were always this future-obsessed. Take electricity, for example, arguably the most significant innovation of the late 1800s. In 1883 Darmstadt University of Technology, MIT, and Cornell started teaching Electrical Engineering as a distinct field of study. In 1889 at the expo in Paris (now-famous for the Eiffel Tower which debuted at this fair), there was a large pavilion with various machines [1][2] including electrically-powered moving platforms suspended from the ceiling that shuttled visitors across from the mezzanines [3]. Two years later in 1891 there was an expo held in Frankfurt specifically on electrical technology [4], where several electrical innovations were demonstrated, and two years later at the 1893 Chicago world's fair, there was even more electric features, including motors, generators, lamps, spotlights, and the whole fair was illuminated by electricity [5]. This is, of course, the same time period featured in the xkcd titled 'The Pace of Modern Life' [6], which takes contemporary newspaper quotes lamenting that people are always in a hurry and rarely stop to greet strangers and instead spend their commutes on the trains with their noses buried in newspapers, showing that today's critiques about people lost in their smartphones are more than a century old. So yeah, I'd say we've always been obsessed with the future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/File:Interior_of_exhibition_building,_Exposition_Universal,_Paris,_France.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/Fi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/File:Galerie_des_machines._Les_ponts_roulants.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galerie_des_machines#/media/Fi... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Electrotechnical_Exhibition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Electrotechnical... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition [6] https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/