2000 as Seen in 1910 (23 pics)
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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.
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! )
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.
Oh, but how close we are!
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.
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.
As an example of a lower barrier to entry, the (relatively) new Sport Pilot certificate allows for the operation of smaller, lighter aircraft with training and testing requirements that are not dissimilar to those for getting a driver's license.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_certification_in_the_Unit...
I've spent a lot of time as a passenger in small planes and I have a good idea of what's involved in a preflight. I'm not against safety in general, but I think lawsuits and government oversight have really held back general aviation. A plane should be more reliable and therefore expensive than a car with a similar level of sophistication, but it doesn't need to cost 15 times as much.
Edit: based on khafra's comment, a possible reading of my earlier comment is that it's no more complicated to fly a plane than drive a car. I intended to say that it's no more complicated to build a single-engine propeller-driven airplane than to build a car.
I personally don't agree that safety has held personal flight back. It's just not practical except for longer distances.
As far as safety goes...I agree that personal flight has a great track record. But it's difficult to say if this would continue (absent a beautiful autopilot system) if we gave out pilot's licenses to 90% of 17 year olds and filled the sky with millions of small aircraft.
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.)
When flying, not only are you responsible for getting yourself where you want to go, you are also responsible for not running out of fuel and crashing onto a family of four having a nice barbecue. This is beyond the risk that most people are willing to take. Learning about VORs and DMEs and NDBs and GPSes are not worth the ability to travel across the country 2x to 4x faster than driving, especially when the distances people want to cover are in th 2-6 hour range. 6 hours is not much time. Neither is 3h time. So why not drive the same vehicle you use every day to get to work? There is no risk involved and what are you going to do with the 3 hours flying you own plane got you? Drink beer? Meh. Much better than not accidentally murdering anyone.
(Not saying I'm happy with this, but it's the reality. If you want to fly an airplane, You Are Weird. I Am Weird, but I can't expect everyone else to be weird...)
Instead, cars and commercial airlines are where Society Has Decided that their limits are. Everyone can understand paying $500 a month for a car, and everyone can understand paying $159 to sit in a chair and be levitated to Phoenix for the weekend. So that's where the land / air tradeoff currently is.
(Do I like this? Nope. I fly 100,000 miles a year and am willing to pay $10,000 to $20,000 to become a private pilot, with the expected benefit of saying "I'll rent a plane and fly us to Door County this weekend" to some girl I like. Economically sensible? Absolutely not. Hence, not very many people do it. Flying is magic. The general public is not ready to harness magic in the form of throttle, elevator, aileron, and rudder.)
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.
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.
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.
Roomba, on the otherhand, is a pathetic, if you compare it to visions.
TTS's dirty little is that it's actually much faster to read something yourself than have something read to you, assuming you are fluent in the language. It's not a failing of TTS, it's just people not properly considering the use of technology. The same goes for the roomba and the programmable microwave. It makes much more sense to have small single-purpose robots that function well, than a single multipurpose humanoid robot.
(Hmmm, a free $30 credit Twilio account and their "detect answering machine" API call could generate a sample of 3000 random phone numbers pretty quickly...)
As for robots, sure we don't have robots of the kind in the images shown, but the machinery we use to build skyscrapers in a fraction of the time it took 100 years ago is quite amazing. The heavy-earth machinery, cranes, railway-track building machines etc don't look like robots, but they do the same stuff.
The future is definitely here :)
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?
Well, no hang-gliders yet, but have you seen those cops on their segways? Just saying...
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/RuSVOqUY0CI/AAAAAAAABD...
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
This was obviously in that period after radium was popularised and before all those girls' teeth fell out.
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])
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?)
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.
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. :)
Instead of calling it an elevator they are calling it a depressor.
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.
(And "descenseur" seems to be an actual French word according to http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/descenseur, so much for showing off and knowing my native tongue.)
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!
(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.
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.
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.
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?
(And before anybody mentions Star Trek - Those were actually more like small and fancy Walkie-Talkies. Deal with it.)
I love the way the futuristic technology is placed into a 1910 social context!
Any vision of the future involving buttons, or humans, is a vision of dystopia.
Thinking of this article that was on the front page of HN a couple days ago:
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.
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.
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.
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.
BTW, related: the 1905 French time-warp house
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/02/18/france.timewa...
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/PopularScience/11-1963/t...
( Taken from http://blog.modernmechanix.com/ which is full of old science magazine clippings )