2000 as Seen in 1910 (23 pics)

http://acidcow.com/pics/17678-futur-imagined-23-pics.html

by coderdude • 15 years ago

196 104 15 years ago

tdrgabi• 15 years ago

half of them already happened. I should start working on the other half

Jencha• 15 years ago

Well, not "so wrong". For example pic 10. Today we call it skype with webcamera. And it doesn't even need a footpedal. :)

citricsquid• 15 years ago

I 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? ;)

itsnotvalid3• 15 years ago

They 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.

JoeAltmaier3• 15 years ago

Yes, they were in the age of mechanization and the easy prediction was "everything will be mechanized"

georgecmu2• 15 years ago

They 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.

bergie2• 15 years ago

It would actually be very cool to build a "Skype videoconferencing device" using the steampunk-ish parts shown in that picture.

ugh• 15 years ago

Paleofuture has – as always – at least some context: 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• 15 years ago

Yeah 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• 15 years ago

Comical?

Well, no hang-gliders yet, but have you seen those cops on their segways? Just saying...

maukdaddy• 15 years ago

I particularly like "Heating with Radium"!

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSVOqUY0CI/AAAAAAAABD...

akkartik• 15 years ago

Whether 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• 15 years ago

They totally stole those images from Paleofuture. Lame.

xster• 15 years ago

the artist clearly isn't a union member, replacing all the jobs with robots

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Except for videophone operator, and pill waiter, and record butler.

I love the way the futuristic technology is placed into a 1910 social context!

klenwell• 15 years ago

Reminds me of a quote I saw on Twitter somewhere:

Any vision of the future involving buttons, or humans, is a vision of dystopia.

Derbasti• 15 years ago

It is 2011 and I still don't have a flying car. What a shame!

sethg• 15 years ago

As somone who lives in Boston, I think it’s just as well that our drivers are limited to two dimensions.

jimbokun• 15 years ago

In 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/

abredow• 15 years ago

Well, they were right about 1 thing: mutton chops will never go out of style!

ekanes• 15 years ago

My favorite is that they've got some gadget upgrades, but they're all dressed about the same. So comfy!

maushu• 15 years ago

I love this kind of stuff. Requesting more links if possible.

jodrellblank5• 15 years ago

Must tomorrow's man look like this?

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/PopularScience/11-1963/t...

( Taken from http://blog.modernmechanix.com/ which is full of old science magazine clippings )

51Cards• 15 years ago

They 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.

jodrellblank5• 15 years ago

The 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! )

JonnieCache4• 15 years ago

This 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.

itsnotvalid3• 15 years ago

People still see horses in that way -- Horse racing anyone?

bane• 15 years ago

Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair

Oh, but how close we are!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ

iwwr• 15 years ago

The robot surgeon is just an interface for the real surgeon, providing some smooth, precise motion and access into small places (where a human surgeon would have to cut his way through). Hair is on the outside of the body and quite accessible. There is yet no technology that can replace the human hand (yet).

Zak3• 15 years ago

Personalized flight on the whole was really the only big miss.

I think the main reason that isn't more mainstream is that even with small planes, we chose to emphasize safety far more than with road vehicles. I don't know why that is; I'd gladly trade some amount of safety if it meant I could afford to own and operate a plane.

A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car. It costs $275,000 due to regulation and low volume, not because it's inherently more expensive to produce than a car.

treeface3• 15 years ago

A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car.

Not trying to sound snarky here, but have you ever piloted an airplane? The pre-takeoff checks take a little while, require a good bit of technical expertise, and are absolutely required if you want to be pretty damn sure that your airplane won't fall out of the sky. Safety is, at times, overemphasized, but then again your car won't fall from the sky when it stalls.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

with all this modern priority of safety over everything else, man on the Moon is impossible. Heck, even bringing an open fire into a cold dump cave full of people would be a grave safety violation.

zandor• 15 years ago

James May puts it very nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS0IxnxwJSU

jrockway3• 15 years ago

Fly an ultralight instead? Then you don't have to deal with regulations and all that.

I think if people really wanted to fly, there would be mass-market ultralights. But the reality is that driving is just as good and feels safer and easier to understand. (What do you if you get lost flying? You can't just pull over and ask for directions.)

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

Ok no one is letting a robot cut their hair

Although we are using a electric mechanical device to do so. In particular with shaving we have devices that do all the cutting and make it virtually impossible to cut yourself. So kind of similar even there.

rumblestrut• 15 years ago

Flobee. Enough said.

http://www.flowbee.com

lloeki2• 15 years ago

And there are electric hair driers, hair irons, shavers and various chemical products allowing one to change hair shape and color at will.

dirtyaura2• 15 years ago

I think the true wisdom in past future predictions is something that people didn't get right. For example another (my) take on the three first predictions, that you listed as successes, are: no practical text-to-speech(1), no truly intercontinental trains(2), no robots on construction sites(3)

If you look it from that perspecive, there's something to be learned. It's easy to vision, but it's difficult to understand what things are truly hard or things that surprisingly worked against all odds.

For example, people have been waiting for practical home robots for decades, but operating autonomously in the real world is really difficult problem, much harder that it intuitively feels (because we are so good at it).

On the otherhand, I think very few people predicted something like Wikipedia (or HN, Quora etc): free, quality information, produced by volunteers. It's hard problem too, but it just worked.

My gut feeling is that it's the social phenomena that we underestimate in our future predictions.

burgerbrain2• 15 years ago

"no practical text-to-speech"

Huh? How do you figure? I use text-to-speech all the time and besides sounding distinctly robotic, it works extremely well. And the current state-of-the-art stuff is damn near as good as HAL9000.

EDIT: and we do have practical home robots, they're called roombas and programmable microwaves. They just don't look like something out of the Jetsons, and we've seen the technology improve over time, so we don't think of it as anything special.

efnx• 15 years ago

It really depends on how literal you take these pictures to be. You could say that picture three suggests "we will have computer aided manufacturing," but you could also say it suggests "robots will build our houses." I think what these pictures show more than anything, is the kind of tangential predictions people seem to make about the future. "Everything will be automated with lots of tiny mechanical arms and levers. Everything will fly (because flight is really hot right now." This is a great example of zeerust (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust). Though interpreted vaguely these predictions are for the most part pretty good IMO.

praptak• 15 years ago

Hm, 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")

JoeAltmaier3• 15 years ago

Perhaps some things weren't every going to change?

JonnieCache4• 15 years ago

I 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

schrototo• 15 years ago

What'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.

segabach• 15 years ago

The 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• 15 years ago

Better still, we could walk around with our Facebook wall (and little text ads) displayed on our backs!

icegreentea• 15 years ago

One 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• 15 years ago

That 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• 15 years ago

If 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.

marknutter• 15 years ago

Anyone know of some modern equivalents? What do we think the year 2100 is going to look like, for instance?

ghc• 15 years ago

I 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.

JonnieCache4• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

how about the singularity.

lallysingh• 15 years ago

It's fun to watch the evolution of Star Trek series.

coffeeaddicted• 15 years ago

Sure - 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).

JoeAltmaier3• 15 years ago

They had airports, bikes with farings, tanks, videophones, wireless news all down.

Apparently fashions weren't ever going to change!

JonnieCache4• 15 years 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.

bergie2• 15 years ago

Also, 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..."

tybris• 15 years ago

Whatever happened to predicting the future? We should make predictions for 2100 for them to laugh at our naivety.

joelburget• 15 years ago

Looking 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• 15 years ago

Another 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.)

georgecmu2• 15 years ago

This 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... , 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

pluies3• 15 years ago

There's an interesting pun in this one: 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• 15 years ago

I simply read that straight as being "a lift moving downwards", can you explain the pun?

pluies3• 15 years ago

Well, 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• 15 years ago

the opposite of elevation is depression

Instead of calling it an elevator they are calling it a depressor.

a-priori• 15 years ago

My 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• 15 years ago

> some early elevator systems

E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster

jodrellblank5• 15 years ago

The sense of perspective in these is mind-bending. Look at the lady passenger, and imagine her taking a couple of steps 'away' from the viewer, to approach the green walkway.

By then she has to be short enough to fit under the wing, and after walking over the gangway, she has to be small enough to get in the Alice-in-Wonderland door, under the wing with no headroom, into a box so small the coachman-pilot would barely squash into it.

The walkway is on top of a building high enough to have an elevator, but the handrail varies Escher style from shin-height to shoulder-height along it's ~two meter length. (And if it is shin height like the steps side suggests, then it's of no use, and if it's shoulder height like the door side suggests then she would fall between the railings, and the gap to the door is a circus acrobat's leap!).

Then the wings, which are about the height of the pilot, but also about thrice the height of the door - not to mention it's a winged vehicle which hovers.

"In the year 2000" the unshielded outside light bulb would be a health and safety violation, let alone all the other aerial acrobatic bits!

celoyd• 15 years ago

It reminds me a little of ukiyo-e, where even beautiful and finely detailed images would have basic errors of perspective.

(For example, in http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g08423/ , the way the boat meets the water is baffling. As far as I can tell, this is an error, not a knowing artistic cheat.)

I assume that the drafting skill of even low-quality drawing went up quickly as photographs became ubiquitous, but I don’t have the art history background to support the notion.

kang• 15 years ago

Does the 8th pic say that 'dinner shall remain dinner';the way of eating would be unchanged?

blhack• 15 years ago

I think that our future is actually more impressive than anything that they could have even possibly imagined then:

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 for an interesting take on this])

jodrellblank5• 15 years ago

MP3 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?)

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

Yes; 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.

moomba• 15 years ago

Glad 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• 15 years ago

I'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.timewa...

mih• 15 years ago

Today's 'Steampunk' is yesteryear's 'Sci-fi'

subwindow• 15 years ago

A 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• 15 years ago

The 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.

2000 as Seen in 1910 (23 pics)

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