The year 2000 illustrated in 1900

These are clearly <i>supposed</i> to be funny.<p>People in diving suits fishing for birds?<p>The school where books are ground up and electrified into pupils' heads?<p>A serious attempt to predict the future is a rare thing indeed, even on the part of science fiction writers, who are often more concerned with allegory and the exploration of ideas than with literally trying to figure out what the future will look like.<p>For my money one of the best "future visions" is Spielberg's Minority Report. Not for "pre-crime", but for the suburbs that still look like suburbs, the personalized advertising (perhaps a little extreme), and the general normality of the cities (aside from the silly vertical freeways). The future looks a lot like now - because buildings last a long time, and the landscape changes even less than that.

To be fair, the illustrator(s) did get several trends right: industrialized farming and animal breeding, machine textile manufacture, RVs, classrooms full of kids with headphones in their ears, using computers on the toilet, battle cars (so disappointed we don't call them that), and airplanes that launch missiles.

All content is from <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:France_in_XXI_Century" rel="nofollow">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:France_in_XXI_Cen...</a> , including the text. Only difference is that the images are shown in big size, not just as thumbnails (even then, they are just embedded images hosted at Wikimedia). There are more images at Wikimedia. Choose your path. :)

Many people here don't get the ironic nature of these drawings.<p>So, sorry to unveil this fact to you: It was just for the fun. Teacher pushing books in the crusher to feed student earphones? Underwater flying? Flying cops? All this is funny speculation that has a single purpose: entertainment. It is just like drawings of Dubout, with a scifi theme instead of cats (and a lower artistic value).<p>So, in makes it even more surprising that it has some relevance to today's achievement. I would like to compare with serious "scientific" forecasts of the future at the same time. I would bet they weren't as accurate as these drawings.

What strikes me as significant about the predictions, is, what has dictated our development is the kinds of materials we can produce, not necessarily the ideas behind what you can build from those materials. I realise the illustrations are flights of fantasy from the imagination.<p>However I wonder if you focus on the materials of the future you could make more accurate predictions.<p>For example carbon nanotubes is a material of the future (I've heard it said we could build a lift to the moon with carbon nanotubes).<p>Superconductivity, when we can make room temperature superconductive material, well blows the mind to think what you can make with that. Hover cars?<p>Wireless electricity, not strictly a material, but a game changer none the less.

No one could have predicted the horrors about to befall France in the 20th century...the bloom of her youth destroyed on the battlefields of the First World War, followed economic depression and then defeat and occupation by the Nazis. In many ways, the French nation died and never made it to 2000.

My first impression was: why so many underwater pictures? Did they figure we were running out of landmass? Or is it because the ocean was one of the frontiers associated with exploration?

Did you notice there are only pictures of white people? (France still had a lot of colonies during the 1900's and traded actively around the world).

One can recite the old adage "Prediction is hard, especially about the future" and laugh at these. But one important lesson that they give is that how hard to break free from the constraints of current thinking to be totally innovative. Look at the floor cleaning robot depicted in "Electric Scrubbing" and compare with the Roomba. The robot is essentially a mechanical French maid (now, there's an interesting thought), i.e. the manner of cleaning is <i>exactly</i> the same.<p>Another example is "A Tailor of Latest Fashion" where what seems to be a steam engine powers an automatic dress maker.

Just interesting, nobody could ever imagine computers that fit in your hand. Everything there is about the physical tools, nobody imagined that tools would instead become intelligent.

Though absolutely no advancements in fashion :-)<p>If even the jump from the 80s to now has taught me anything, we, right now, are going to look <i>ridiculous</i> to people in 30 years, let alone 100.

When this stuff was posted three years ago on HN, there was a link to an interesting site that has many examples of future predictions <a href="http://www.paleofuture.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.paleofuture.com/</a>.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=729904" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=729904</a>

I think we tend to quickly forget the motivations of creating these, because they are 100 years old. They appear to have commercial links-- so 'interesting' would probably have been a more important quality than honesty or in depth thought on the matter. For example, i don't believe anyone giving proper consideration in 1900 would believe we would be under the sea 'fishing' for seagulls.. it was just an interesting idea that would be possible.<p>If this were CNN today on a 2100 prediction HN would be all over it calling it populist/sensationalist/lazy etc.<p>I'm surprised they didn't guess 'wireless' a little more (the classroom) since radio was being invented at the time (even wireless headphones were almost technically possible with a crystal radio).

Google Books also archives many, many old Popular Science magazines. They have some wild predictions like planes towing trailers. [0] Quite an interesting read for the classic illustrations, DIY plans that are <i>still</i> useful today, chemistry experiments that would make the ATF and DEA blush, and of course the endless pages of ads peddling every contraption imaginable.<p>[0]: <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=WCQDAAAAMBAJ&#38;lpg=PA102&#38;dq=popular%20science%201949&#38;pg=PA107#v=onepage&#38;q&#38;f=true" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=WCQDAAAAMBAJ&#38;lpg=PA102&...</a>

I found this also to be very beautiful: <a href="http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/08/23/space-colony-art-from-the-1970s/" rel="nofollow">http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/08/23/space-colony-art-fr...</a>

&#62; In the year 2000, EVERYBODY RIDES MUTANT EEL BEASTS.<p>Why didn't this happen?

These is quite prescient, interpreted liberally:<p>* Very liberally, drive-through car wash * Air as a domain for combat * Commuter air travel * Aerial firefighting * Air mail * (okay, nobody's riding on seahorses) * Roomba * (okay, nobody's hunting seagulls) * Air traffic control * Mechanized farming * Spy drones * Mechanized animal processing * Automated goods fabrication * (okay, nobody's stealing eagle eggs) * (okay, nobody's riding fish) * Synthesizers * Mobile homes * Online education * Very liberally, drive-through car wash (again) * Tanks/armored vehicles * Bombers * (okay, nobody's playing sports underwater) * (okay, nobody's domesticating whales or commuting underwater)<p>Most of what they got right: things we do which are labor-intensive and could be automated<p>Most of what they got wrong: the value or cost of putting people under water, and the degree to which animals play a role in daily life

Back to the Future 2 was made in 1989 and hit on several things. Most predictions seem to think we'd all be in flying cars by now.<p><a href="http://gawker.com/5667202/11-things-from-back-to-the-future-ii-that-actually-came-true-and-3-that-havent-yet" rel="nofollow">http://gawker.com/5667202/11-things-from-back-to-the-future-...</a>

These were clearly made mostly-in-jest, however I was a little amused at the juxtaposition of archaic flying vessels together with personalized consumer-level air travel.<p>While we have long since passed the era of the Zeppelin, we're certainly nowhere near cruising along with air-taxis or wing/slash/jet packs.

The "limited" creativity of its creator is very clear. He/She seems to be obsessed with either going in the air or going under water. I wonder whether this creativity was truly individual, and would a collective creativity been able to fathom the future to a better degree.

That reminds me of this book on life in 2010, written in the 70s, which is also great:<p><a href="http://2010book.tumblr.com/post/310745454/cover" rel="nofollow">http://2010book.tumblr.com/post/310745454/cover</a>

I think these illustrations hit closer to reality than the predictions from the sci-fi authors we just read about in the recent HN post "1987 Time Capsule Predictions by Sci-Fi Writers About 2012"

I'm wondering why they are so many pictures of underwater activities ?

Edward Bellamy wrote a book about 2000 in 1887 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward</a>

The thing that always gets me about these old timey predictions, is while they are probably way far fetched from their perspective the reality seems to be even more incredible (jets flying faster than the speed of sound, as opposed to blimps). I think it really lends credence to the idea that humans think of technology in terms of a linear progression, but it's actually exponential.

Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his own personal dirigible balloon around Paris circa 1900 (see new post <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317490" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317490</a>). He was the only person to experience unrestricted personal urban airflight and is certainly a major inspiration for those illustrations here that depict air travel.

Reading articles like this makes me wonder, is there any "prediction" made by people today for, say, 100 years from now? I wonder how the future people would think about those "predictions" :)<p>Or, since I want to be alive to share the laugh, any prediction for year 2020-2050 made this year or last year?

Site is down for me - here is the cached Google version:<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wOFiv4ZiP7IJ:publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wOFiv4Z...</a>

I thought it was interesting how it showed so many airplanes. A lot of them look like real planes and they use terms like "plane" and "helicopter." The first manned flight wasn't until 1903, but I guess it wasn't out of nowhere. The idea was "in the air" so to speak.

We are about to accomplish most of the dreams they had about air travel. The only thing remaining is free Internet while on plane :) (I know it exists but very uncommon especially in Europe)

It is sad, I get excited whenever I see anything remotely Steampunk.

kind of adorable... whatever we imagine life to be like in the year 2100, chances are we'll look just as silly in retrospect as these illustrations<p>edit: gracias

Interesting that many of the illustrations were related to aviation- Aviation Police,Aerial Firemen or even Robbers.

How did they know so much about anime?

Summary: everything flies.

This.... this is beautiful