10 ms·
2000 as Seen in 1910 (23 pics)
- tdrgabi 16y agohalf of them already happened. I should start working on the other half
- Jencha 16y agoWell, not "so wrong". For example pic 10. Today we call it skype with webcamera. And it doesn't even need a footpedal. :)
- citricsquid 16y agoI think I could replicate that set up right now. Webcam attached to the wall below my projector. Anybody else with a projector want to make this a reality? ;)
- itsnotvalid 16y agoThey even got the helicopter and humvee right (sort of). The people in 1900s have over-estimated the usage of robotic arms. We don't have that kind of arms working on human yet, but we do have them on automotive manufacturing.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoYes, they were in the age of mechanization and the easy prediction was "everything will be mechanized"
- itsnotvalid 16y agoThe projector thing is really a very accurate prediction. Since there is no such concept at that simply a light bulb could produce a clear imaging of some remote users, without using any prerecorded films.
- georgecmu 16y agoThey even got the helicopter and humvee right (sort of). The French started experimenting with helicopters in 1906, so it's not that surprising. The people in 1900s have over-estimated the usage of robotic arms. We don't have that kind of arms working on human yet, but we do have them on automotive manufacturing. We don't have robotic arms in consumer products yet (I believe this will change in the next 10 years), but they are pervasive in the manufacturing industry in general, not just in the automotive manufacturing.
- jodrellblank 16y agoWe don't have robotic arms in consumer products yet (I believe this will change in the next 10 years) Why do you believe that? The best use I've come up with for them is for disabled people - a *plegic with a robot arm on a desk able to manipulate post, or on wheels able to be an avatar in the real world. But that's the sort of profitable insurance-funded medical use which still isn't around. Currently they only exist in consumer space in the arm-for-amputees sense, and in the Lego Technics sense, and I expect that to continue, but where else would they start appearing for consumer products?
- bergie 16y agoIt would actually be very cool to build a "Skype videoconferencing device" using the steampunk-ish parts shown in that picture.
- ugh 16y agoPaleofuture has – as always – at least some context: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/9/10/french-prints-show-the-year-2000-1910.html http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/9/10/french-prints-show... I wonder to what extent these prints are just jokes. Will someone in a thousand years look back at Futurama and think it was a serious prediction of the future?
- jhamburger 16y agoYeah I'm not sure they were really predicting that police would fly around in hang-glider suits. The image was probably just comical then, as it is now.
- moe 16y agoComical? Well, no hang-gliders yet, but have you seen those cops on their segways? Just saying...
- maukdaddy 16y agoI particularly like "Heating with Radium"! http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSVOqUY0CI/AAAAAAAABDo/xderWVHa-o0/s1600-h/Heating+with+Radium.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSVOqUY0CI/AAAAAAAABD...
- akkartik 16y agoWhether they were serious or not, they'd probably find it weird to be held up as the canonical word on 'what people thought in 1910' (for all of 15 minutes)
- quinndupont 16y agoThey totally stole those images from Paleofuture. Lame.
- xster 16y agothe artist clearly isn't a union member, replacing all the jobs with robots
- Vivtek 16y agoExcept for videophone operator, and pill waiter, and record butler. I love the way the futuristic technology is placed into a 1910 social context!
- klenwell 16y agoReminds me of a quote I saw on Twitter somewhere: Any vision of the future involving buttons, or humans, is a vision of dystopia.
- Derbasti 16y agoIt is 2011 and I still don't have a flying car. What a shame!
- sethg 16y agoAs somone who lives in Boston, I think it’s just as well that our drivers are limited to two dimensions.
- jimbokun 16y agoIn other words, the reason we don't have flying cars is the same reason we don't have nuclear powered devices that run for decades or centuries without recharging. We can't trust the general public to be responsible with them. Thinking of this article that was on the front page of HN a couple days ago: http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/07/67/ http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/07/67/
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- abredow 16y agoWell, they were right about 1 thing: mutton chops will never go out of style!
- ekanes 16y agoMy favorite is that they've got some gadget upgrades, but they're all dressed about the same. So comfy!
- maushu 16y agoI love this kind of stuff. Requesting more links if possible.
- jodrellblank 16y agoMust tomorrow's man look like this? http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/PopularScience/11-1963/tomorrows_man/tomorrows_man_0.jpg http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/PopularScience/11-1963/t... ( Taken from http://blog.modernmechanix.com/ http://blog.modernmechanix.com/ which is full of old science magazine clippings )
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- 51Cards 16y agoThey weren't so wrong... sure their form factors were way off but they had all the ideas down... 1. Electronic Books 2. High speed aerodynamic trains 3. Computer aided manufacturing 4. Motorized personal transport 6&7. Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair or do makeup, but we're using robots for surgery 9. Aerodynamic motorcycles 10. Webcams 11. Where's my flying car! 12. Tanks 13. Electronic news etc. etc. If you look at the concept alone, for 100 years ago they weren't THAT far off. Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss. Edit: I understand the horse one now. Back then horses were used for everything... but by 2000 they predicted everything would be machines, so seeing a horse would be a curiosity, not the daily norm. You would take your kids to see a horse, petting zoo anyone? Pretty prescient to me.
- jodrellblank 16y agoThe other big miss is that the outside scenes have one or two people and a lot of green, and the indoor scenes have a tiny amount of utilitarian furniture. There's no sense of stuff and clutter, urbanisation and buildings everywhere and people people people. ( and the train is nothing like high speed and aerodynamic - it has balconies! )
- JonnieCache 16y agoThis could be limitations of the artist and of the medium. These images were produced by chromolithography, a many-staged process of chemical interactions. Adding lots and lots of details and tiny, realistic figures would be difficult. And perhaps expensive. I can imagine a situation where the cost of the process is an exponential function of the number of places different colours have to border each other without bleeding. It's tricky enough to draw that kind of thing in any medium.
- itsnotvalid 16y agoPeople still see horses in that way -- Horse racing anyone?
- bane 16y agoOk no one is letting a robot cut their hair Oh, but how close we are! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ
- praptak 16y agoHm, for some of them I couldn't even see which part is supposed to be so two-thousandy, e.g. the fifth from the top. (Edit: Got it from paleofuture - it's the "phonographic message")
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoPerhaps some things weren't every going to change?
- JonnieCache 16y agoI love that the one with the room being lit by what appears to be an electric light in the fireplace is captioned "Heating With Radium" This was obviously in that period after radium was popularised and before all those girls' teeth fell out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
- schrototo 16y agoWhat's interesting is that they weren't really that far off with a lot of their predictions. They just couldn't get past their current level of technology, their imagination was restricted by what they were familiar with.
- marknutter 16y agoAnyone know of some modern equivalents? What do we think the year 2100 is going to look like, for instance?
- ghc 16y agoI believe you'd have to turn to science fiction writing these days. Well, that or the futurist movement. But for the most part, I think the public has lost its thirst for knowledge about the far off future. We're much more of a "want it now!" culture. I find it very sad.
- JonnieCache 16y agoI think this is because people have gotten so used to rapid innovation that they no longer look to the far future for the arrival of new tech, because it now arrives week on week. As a consumer, why speculate on the next 100 years when you know from experience that you will have some undreamed of tech next year? I don't see this as a bad thing. As long as those in society that actually do the innovating don't completely succumb to a similar myopia.
- tjmaxal 16y agohow about the singularity.
- lallysingh 16y agoIt's fun to watch the evolution of Star Trek series.
- coffeeaddicted 16y agoSure - technology will advance to a point where it will be indistinguishable from magic. So the world will look exactly like World of Warcraft. Everyone monotonously doing the same stuff over and over every day while dragons (and any other kind of genetic mutations) will roam the landscape (carrying ads most likely).
- segabach 16y agoThe one thing they totally failed to predict was the trend toward much more casual clothing. Partially due to technology becoming available to all the classes but even upper class people would find this level of dress over the top for current times. How long before we end up in the stereotypical white space jump suit?
- wisty 16y agoBetter still, we could walk around with our Facebook wall (and little text ads) displayed on our backs!
- icegreentea 16y agoOne reason for the "casualization" of dress were the world wars. Rationing and general mood (and having your country ripped apart) made it kinda impossible to dress extragantantly as a rule anymore. After the war ended, it kinda stuck (just like the daily shaving thing).
- jpr 16y agoThat sure sounds plausible, but is there any evidence that this was actually the case? I'm always looking for excuses to dress extravagantly and not shave.
- russell 16y agoIf they could have accurately predicted today's women's clothing, the cards would have been banned as porn. Even SF cant manage the future. Forbidden Planet, one of my favorite movies, all the men had DA haircuts. Start Trek crew had these monster devices hanging out their ears. Heinlein envisioned Autodesk but the drawings were made by a robot device.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoThey had airports, bikes with farings, tanks, videophones, wireless news all down. Apparently fashions weren't ever going to change!
- JonnieCache 16y ago>Apparently fashions weren't ever going to change! It is very sensible of them not to attempt to predict fashion IMO, because it is by its very nature unpredictable, and possibly irrational and random, depending on how you look at it. Imagine how much more ridiculous these would have been were all the people depicted in one-piece silver jumpsuits or something.
- bergie 16y agoAlso, using fashion from their own era enabled the artist to describe the social contexts. So you know who are wealthy people, who are servants, policemen etc, because they wear the stuff you expect them to. Otherwise you'd have to explain "the guys with the red jumpsuits are police, the yellow..."
- nato1138 16y agoso much hardware. no silicon.
- tybris 16y agoWhatever happened to predicting the future? We should make predictions for 2100 for them to laugh at our naivety.
- joelburget 16y agoLooking back at old visions of the future, they always seem to imagine the obvious things, e.g. flying cars and nuclear power. What I haven't ever seen is anything close to modern computers, which arguably have just as profound an impact on our lives and are probably more impressive technologically.
- skore 16y agoAnother well known phenomenon in old science fiction is the utter lack mobile phones. Flying around space, shooting at each other with laser rifles. And then they hop into a phone booth to have A VIDEO CALL! (Yes, I'm looking at you, Blade Runner.) (And before anybody mentions Star Trek - Those were actually more like small and fancy Walkie-Talkies. Deal with it.)
- georgecmu 16y agoThis page doesn't give any context for the images. This is a series of Villemard postcards from 1910. There's a set of 24 on flickr (with titles): http://www.flickr.com/photos/amphalon/sets/72157615623434624/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/amphalon/sets/72157615623434624... , but I think their origin on the web is from the BNF (National Library of France) exposition here: http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/feuill/index.htm http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/feuill/index.htm
- pluies 16y agoThere's an interesting pun in this one: http://acidcow.com/pics/20110225/future_11.jpg http://acidcow.com/pics/20110225/future_11.jpg The label next to "concierge" reads "descenseur". It's a reference to the French word for a lift, "ascenseur", from "ascension", "to go upwards". A descenseur would then be the exact opposite of a lift - an apparatus to go downwards. :)
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoI simply read that straight as being "a lift moving downwards", can you explain the pun?
- pluies 16y agoWell, this is the pun; although I guess a better description would be "a made-up word with a meaning that might not be instantly clear to non-French speakers" rather than a "pun".
- forensic 16y agothe opposite of elevation is depression Instead of calling it an elevator they are calling it a depressor.
- a-priori 16y agoMy theory is that this isn't a pun, but rather a term that's no longer in use. I seem to remember that some early elevator systems had two connected shafts and two cars, instead of one car and a counterweight like modern elevators. In this arrangement, cars go in a loop around a pulley at the top and bottom, always in the same direction. Thus, one shaft is the "up" shaft and one is the "down" shaft. This image depicts the top floor, so elevators only go down from there. It may have been common practice at the time in France to call the elevator shaft that carries you down to be the descenseur and the one that carries you up to be the ascenseur. Nowadays, ascenseur is used all the time because an elevator car goes both ways.
- wnoise 16y ago> some early elevator systems E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster
- kang 16y agoDoes the 8th pic say that 'dinner shall remain dinner';the way of eating would be unchanged?
- blhack 16y agoI think that our future is actually more impressive than anything that they could have even possibly imagined then: http://thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/ http://thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/ What's interesting is that these illustrations are only 100 years old. The things we have right now, smart phones, robots, the internet, MP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining. Honestly, the things we have now seem beyond what people were imagining even 50 years ago. I wonder if we'll see this large of a technological revolution again in the coming 100 years (or an even bigger one [check this video out: http://vimeo.com/2319926 http://vimeo.com/2319926 for an interesting take on this])
- jodrellblank 16y agoMP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining. Yes; the servant carrying a wax cylinder for the gramophone device was a huge miss. It missed electronic amplification and loudspeakers, it missed miniaturisation of audio players, it missed room sized personal libraries of vinyl/tapes/CDs, and of course it missed digitisation of music and electronic or wireless transfer of information, and it potentially missed the ubiquity of cheap music such that he's more likely to have music playing in the background while doing something else than to sit down and listen to it as an activity in itself. (and now that I think of it, why do they have robot builders, robot barbers, robot makeup machines, but still a servant to carry a song to him on a silver platter?)
- kenjackson 16y agoYes; the servant carrying a wax cylinder for the gramophone device was a huge miss. Yeah, I don't get that one. What was the advance here supposed to be? I would have imagined that's what rich people did in 1910.
- joeyo 16y agoMy interpretation is that the wax cylinder is being used as a calling card to announce a visitor. If so, it's a miss for at least two reasons: 1. Why would you choose to listen to a calling card rather than read it and 2. social customs changed, eliminating the custom of leaving calling cards.
- moomba 16y agoGlad I didn't live in that future. As has been said by others, predictions of the future often tell you more about the society making the prediction than what will actually come to pass.
- hernan7 16y agoI'm with those that think these were supposed to be comical. BTW, related: the 1905 French time-warp house http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/02/18/france.timewarp.house/index.html?hpt=C2 http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/02/18/france.timewa...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mih 16y agoToday's 'Steampunk' is yesteryear's 'Sci-fi'
- subwindow 16y agoA lot of the concepts are correct, but the surprising thing is the lack of advancements in materials. The images use cloth, soft metals, wood and canvas for everything. It's almost impossible to state how big an impact plastics and high quality metals have made on our day-to-day lives.
- teyc 16y agoThe surprising thing is what they totally got wrong. 1. For instance, the backdrop of trees and green at the railway station. The intensity of urbanisation over the century sees every piece of land getting built over. 2. The mass availability of high technology. For instance, we were shown imaginings of servants bringing musical pieces for the phonograph. 3. An unpredictable technology - the age of electronics - totally transforms machines.