A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000
publicdomainreview.org
publicdomainreview.org
Here's the cover picture for the set, which few sources have.[2]
There's much similar material from 1900-1925. Some of which even worked.[3]
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:France_in_XXI_Ce...
[2] https://www.le-livre.fr/photos/R15/R150145246.jpg
[3] http://120years.net/the-staccatonehugo-gernsbakgermany1923/
The Teleharmonium was the first musical synthesizer. The approach was to have one tone generator for each note, and switchgear run from a keyboard. That's a reasonable idea, and electric organs of the 1950s to 1970s worked that way.
But this was before amplifiers. They wanted to distribute the music over telephone wires to speakers in hotels, and needed power. So each tone generator was a sizable electrical generator. The whole installation was building-sized.
[1] https://i0.wp.com/120years.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/...
"Who here is down to start seahorse racing?" is basically what I'm asking, lol.
Also, what's up with the pictures of humans riding sea creatures?!
Probably had a lot to do with 20000 leagues under the sea.
I was actually surprised at how much flying was depicted. While blimps were a thing, the idea of an aircraft as pictured wasn't something that existed (AFAIK). You can see some of that with the fact that everyone just had wings and nothing else. However, there were a few propeller airplanes in the mix which somewhat surprised me.
The other part I find fascinating is what they thought you COULD easily automate with mechanical means (like a barber, lol!)
Some of it they hit right on the mark (like farming) others were way off on how easily they'd be automated.
I also thought the automated band was simply funny. I'm sure we could do it today, but why? We'd rather digitally record and replay that 10000 times.
I think the "automated band" refers to musical automation like player pianos and fairground organs. Today, you might still find them in vintage carousels.
Another direction in making music cheaper was electric organs, such as the Hammond organ. In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of American churches bought a Hammond organ as a cheaper alternative to bellows-driven organs.
Here's a entertaining and popular video of a guy playing the bells and whistles on a fairground organ.[1]
I feel like many people here on HN are in the same spots. While ML has worked for few fields, there are some ML enthusiasts that believe most jobs, even creative ones will be automated within 10-20 years, which I find unlikely.
This is how I feel when people prophesize about super-intelligent AI. Sure, it could happen, and it could revolutionize society, but maybe we're just extrapolating outside the limits of what is feasible. Maybe the idea will seem quaint in 100 years when IT is a boring field and futurists have much more interesting fodder to work with.
Replace the mechanisms with today's robots or the rural postman with a digital worker (email).
Flying cars may still be a ways off, but flying busses (airplanes) are certainly quite commonplace and have transformed the world.
With the Panhard brothers arranging the Paris to Lyon race in the 1890s, you'd think the artist would have heard of this, and anticipated more cars. Notice the background of the cities, there are almost no cars on the streets.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Vingti%C3%A8me_si%C3%A8cle....