ping
Thanks for posting this article. I enjoyed it.
We need the flying firemen, by the way. That was a good idea.
Many people predicting the future suffer from the Jetsons syndrome. They believe that the people of the future will have many fancy gadgets, but that this will not impact their character and behavior.
Experience has shown that this is not so.
Thank you for the laughs!
Like today’s global warming predictions.
They had a sort of Jules Verne steampunk thing going on. I’d be in fear for my life in that mechanized barbershop full of robotic arms with scissors, though.
Wapo is the joyless tortise of the old media. FR had a thread several years ago about the French art, the subject of the posted piece.
Would have to search my archive HDs to get the date stamp on saved pix.
The full range is amusing, especially the flying postman.
Present Brains can’t predict the future ?
No, I haven't gone liberal, I just don't drive anymore.
/johnny
Kipling’s “With the Night Mail”
https://archive.org/details/withnightmailsto00kipluoft
Of equal interest are the assumptions they made about what would be the same. Dirt roads, electric consoles but with mechanical levers, hardwood floors, empty city streets.
And the mechanical barber shop that required barbers at the machine control, one per customer. If they were going to have one barber per one machine per customer, what’s the point of having the machine at all?
It would be interesting to learn about predictions from back then about the future of society and relationships.
For example, would the people of 100 years ago have envisioned:
1. open homosexuality, and special rights for homosexuals in the law.
2. the women’s rights movement, so many women in the workplace doing any job a man would do.
3. the collapse of any social stigma against out of wedlock pregnancy and child rearing, which are also endorsed by our governmental policies of giving welfare to single mothers.
4. The open acceptance and legal access to pornography.
5. Various forms of legalized gambling across the country.
6. The decline in church attendance and decline in religious influence in the culture, and in people’s lives.
7. Acceptance of formerly stigmatized sexual behavior.
8. Entertainment media which pushes and normalizes what would have been unacceptable, bizarre, or immoral behaviors.
9. Decline of family ties, lack of social stigma against people, esp. women, who choose not to get married.
Just off the top of my head, I wonder about some of these things. And then wonder, based on some changes we’ve seen in society, do some of the changes I’ve noted help set the stage for even more changes? Will the structures of society which have changed in the last 100 years change into somethings we would not even envision today?
For example, no way people 100 years ago would have envisioned homosexual marriage. What might be accepted 100 years from now may not have even been conceived of today by any of us.
The 1930 movie “Just Imagine”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eldqx1MChyc
Very similar ‘style’ depicted as in these pictures.
Fun movie too.
communication (Pony express in 1900 vs texting Fiji today),
transportation (a month to cross the US in 1900, to 3 hours today),
which nations are at the top (it wasn't the US in 1900),
global population (only 1.6 Billion souls in 1900, and only 78 million in the US... now 7 Billion globally, and 38 million in CA alone),
medicine (imagine surgery in 1900),
Our grandchildren (or great-grands, depending on your age now) will laugh at Terabytes, keyboards, cancer, power lines, microwave ovens, bullet trains, and HD/3D.
