People of the late 19th century had great hopes that technological innovation 100 years into the future would change human life for the better. With new color printing techniques, artists of the era offered their visions of the future in richly saturated collector’s cards, postcards, and cartoons to a greater audience than ever before possible.
Some imagined a world of robot barbers and manicurists and leisure sports extending to underwater croquet and jet-pack-propelled tennis and hunting in the sky. Other wild dreams like a “correspondence cinema”—in which a person with enough wires and equipment at home could see and talk to someone in a remote location—have long been realized more practically than ever imagined.
More than a century has passed since this flourishing of popular art envisioning the future. Writer Adam Tanner looks back at these depictions to reveal how some futurists were hilariously off-base, while others uncannily predicted the world of today.
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