What people in 1899 thought would happen to travel technology

And then everyone looks at them through the lens of recent technology and hails the most idiotic predictions as visionary.

    [The] reason [science fiction is] powerful is
    that it resonates of history. It doesn't
    resonate back from the future, it resonates
    out of modern history.

"The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote an analysis of what he called the poetics of space. The inside of a house, he said, acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. The same process occurs when we deal with time.

Much of what we associate with or even know about such periods as "long ago" or "the beginning" or "at the end of time" is poetic — made up. For a historian of Middle Kingdom Egypt, "long ago" will have a very clear sort of meaning, but even this meaning does not totally dissipate the imaginative, quasi-fictional quality one senses lurking in a time very different and distant from our own. For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away."

while ones from 1899, not so accurate: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:France_in_XXI_Century...

The 1899 depictions are due to earlier models from people like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_P%C3%A9naud and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cl%C3%A9ment_Ader

See for example cell phones - wireless communication was the need, popularized in many sci-fi shows in more specific, imaginative forms, and later informed the actual product (flip phones/Star Trek communicators).