En L'an 2000

September 10, 2012 9:14 PM

Futuristic Postcards from the 1900 World's Exposition in Paris. And a few from New Hampshire.

Also, a Flickr set from that Exhibition, because why not.

posted by Miko (5 comments total)

The postcard makers did get one thing right though: video chatting. That's right, these bizarre artists may have missed the mark when they predicted radium-powered fireplaces and blimp-to-blimp warfare, but they hit the nail on the head when they guessed that the the 21st century would see the creation of a video phone.

This kind of "gee whiz, they got something right, what are the chances" comment always really bugs me. It just seems so ignorant of the way thought progresses. People developed video phones (or whatever, regular phones, the Internet, the automobile, blah blah blah) because they could imagine it and could envision it as useful. Imagination usually precedes invention, and human beings will dream of things for decades, or centuries, before they produce them. There's nothing amazing about that. It wasn't a lucky guess, it was part of the natural progression of conceiving of things that people would want, and then gradually figuring out how to make them happen. Some day we'll have a colony on Mars, and people will be posting our pictures of the Mars Rover landing and going "Wow, they sure hit the nail on the head! How did they ever come up with something that wasn't total hooey!"

I guess it's the number of predictions that are fanciful or ended up not being pragmatic - the problem got solved in another way - that things that look really quite close to the way we actually solved the problem stand out. But it shouldn't be such a surprise!

From the link: Interesting: Despite farming having shown many advances over the years, it is not quite as modern as the artists expected in this postcard

This is really not far off the way farming is actually done on large megafarms. The main difference is that they're projecting wired electric power, when we actually use (subsidized) petroleum to power the robot-GPS-driven combine. And we dispensed with the haystacks, because bales are more train-and-truck friendly.

The main differences you always see are the inability to project wireless technology (odd because people were experimenting with it left and right) and to be able to predict all the complex interactions of techology that might change the other conditions - as in the haybale example. You can imagine machine-harvested hay, and you can imagine trains, but until you try to put a haystack on a train you don't see that you might need another modification in there somewhere.
posted by Miko at 9:21 PM on September 10, 2012

I seem to remember some talk growing up of an early 1900s SF short story that eerily predicted things like fax machines, airplanes, radio and modern workplaces but I can;t for the life of me find it or confirm if it was a hoax or what.
posted by The Whelk at 9:41 PM on September 10, 2012

This is about the 300th time these postcards have been posted.
posted by barnacles at 9:42 PM on September 10, 2012

And studying how people predicted the future is a really interesting coarse of study or even when the concept of 'the future', a place where things where constantly changing and improving started.
posted by The Whelk at 9:42 PM on September 10, 2012

Oh well. Since they keep getting republished o different sites, a MeFi search didn't reveal any connections.

I guess we can take it down. I'll message the mods.
posted by Miko at 9:46 PM on September 10, 2012