“Things can only get better,” D:Ream promised, but they were wrong, as were most people throughout history who tried to predict the future.
But that hasn’t stopped us from trying, and some visionaries have been quite successful. Leonardo da Vinci also envisioned a helicopter and a refrigerator. Joseph Granville suggested in 1661 that lunar travel and communication using “magnetic waves” might be possible. Civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins, writing in 1900, predicted mobile phones, prepared meals, and global digital media (“Photos can be sent via telegram even if you are far away. If there were a battle in China in 100 years, a snapshot of that most shocking event would be in the newspapers an hour later.”). Visionary American cartoonist Arthur Radbaugh in the late 1950s to early 1960s, through his series Closer Than We Think, introduced ideas like wrist-worn televisions, robot-run warehouses, and bloodless surgery.
Many of these predictions, however, turned out to be inaccurate. Watkins believed he could eradicate mosquitoes and the letters C, X, and Q. Radbaugh imagined a colony of monkeys in space riding a hamster wheel-shaped “unicycle” vehicle. Most futurists simply added imaginative touches to existing technological advancements. It requires a great deal of creativity to envisage a truly different world.
Perhaps that is why more outlandish events occur in fiction. Jules Verne’s book Paris in the 20th Century, written in 1860 but not published until 1994, foretold a world with copy machines, techno music, and individuals who view art degrees as foolish. HG Wells took it further (or deeper) by imagining the atomic bomb.
What people anticipate often reveals more about their aspirations and anxieties than the actual future. Predictions tend to surge around significant dates and momentous global occurrences, reflecting contemporary concerns. The rapid technological advancements of the 19th century gave rise to new uncertainties as well as hopes, and the future they envisaged mirrors this duality (women’s pursuit of happiness also emerges as a recurring theme). The 1960s vision encompasses the space race and the “sky’s the limit” enthusiasm that promotes a sense of boundless possibility – alongside the fear of the Cold War and the quest for viable alternatives in case nuclear annihilation renders life on Earth untenable. The reality tends to lie somewhere in between these extremes, but the list of people who have been anticipating the apocalypse for the past millennium serves as a peculiar consolation for those who believed in cataclysmic events involving fire, flood, comet impacts, or the Antichrist. Hey, we’re still here (for now).
It’s a whimsical retrospective vision of the future. So let’s hop off the hoverboard, ask the kangaroo butler, and start with the roast dinner pill.
March of the Intellect, 1829
The imaginative stride of cartoonists is remarkable. Much more captivating than reality. An enormous steam-powered horse emitting smoke; a vacuum tube transport to Bengal; a flying whale gargoyle ferrying convicts to New South Wales in style; a refuse collector biting into a whole pineapple; a postman with elegant wings – it’s bewildering. Heath believed the future would be kinder and more user-friendly. That, to me, signifies progress.
Test tube baby, 19th century
French author and illustrator Albert Robida, in his “Twentieth Century” trilogy created in the 1880s and 1990s, predicted video conferences, doorbell cameras, pneumatic tube transport systems like hyperloops, industrialized food production, and a world polluted with “pathogenic ferments” clogging its rivers. The test tube baby seems a tad on the nose, but the image of a toddler scientist concocting this idea makes me wish they had invented something like ibuprofen instead.
City with a roof, 19th century
The German Hildebrand chocolate company produced trading cards in the late 19th century envisioning various marvels of the future: buildings that could be moved on rails by steam engines, aquatic penny-farthings, summer holidays in the North Pole. Unfortunately, these might only become a reality in about 30 years from now. I won’t name names, but there are a few cities in the UK that could definitely benefit from a rainproof glass roof (cough, Manchester cough).
Crowded, c1901-14
While imagined visions of future transportation frequently depict crowded skies with flying vehicles, road traffic continues to remain tediously earthbound (barely enough space for a two-lane road, I tell you). Robida presented a sleek, almost animalistic driverless vehicle approach. I, however, appreciate the comical impracticality of this airship traffic jam. You can easily tell it’s French from the man’s gesture on the far left. They sure threw this at me at numerous Gaulish crossroads.
Bathroom, 2000, 1899
Commissioned by French toymaker Jean-Marc Côté, illustrations of the year 2000 for the 1900 Paris Exposition achieved fame when Isaac Asimov republished them in 1986. They depict scenarios like underwater hippopotamus and seahorse rides, a bus pulled by whales, and scientists investigating giant, menacing “microorganisms.” I chose this specific piece illustrating how the laziest woman in the world would prefer to conduct her nightly errands. Science, let’s materialize this!
School, 2000, 1899
Another 2000 card portrays a rather bleak vista of the future school. I appreciate how the teacher reassigns the Racine and Molière editions to child apprentices rather than mastering them personally. Côté wasn’t alone in envisioning educational reforms that involve transmitting knowledge through buttons pressed with an audible click, as Arthur Radebaugh did in the late 1950s. The idea was to enable students to advance at a pace
Source: www.theguardian.com
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