Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/24/artists-drawings-from-1899-depicts-france-in-the-year-2000.html
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Particularly look forward, er… backwards to the single hunk of radium fireplace
(certainly extra points for the underwater hippo (hell hippo means ‘horse’) cavalry take that Verne!)
ey! where’s our “Life in the Year 2100” image set? (which can’t just be a bunch of Boston Dynamics bots clamping AI VR goggles to our wizened skulls)
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The electric sweeping machine may have been the first invention depicted here to become a silly anachronism since the first vacuum cleaners were invented just a year or two later.
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Unfortunately, there is one picture that is missing the caption:
For those interested, the caption is: Une Cuisine modèle
https://www.google.com/search?q="en+l'an+2000"+"une+cuisine+modèle"&tbm=isch
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Wonderful things!
Strongly recommend going to the site and scrolling down to where you can page through all the cards, one by one. Many have real insights into the future and many are really flights of fantasy.
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I love the learning machine where the teacher pours books into the machine and the knowledge is electrically transmitted to the students’ brains. Meanwhile, the power is provided by a student turning a crank!
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I love that the information is extracted from the books like a meat grinder.
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yeah, you can tell twenty thousand leagues under the sea ( across, mind you; not down ) was still super popular even 20 years after it was published.
coincidentally, i was planning on a round of sky tennis tomorrow but i guess it’s going to rain. 
thanks for the cruel reminder, postcards
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In the future, techbros will reinvent trains.
In the future, techbros will fantasise about public transport that goes exactly where you want to go.
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I don’t know, that feels like one that’s close to what happened. We have electric sweeping machines that people push around. They just show up in bigger buildings or on roads, and have circular brushes instead of brooms.
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It might be closer than you think.
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Interesting how many of them are underwater.
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I hear most restaurant kitchens these days have a Thermomix - this looks close to the mark.
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I just realized that these drawings were about 10 years before powered flight, and almost 50 years before SCUBA was invented. I suppose pootling about underwater might’ve had a “far future” gravitas as the flying transit or delivery service.
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The French reinvented them better years earlier.
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That one also sort of happened.
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Pretty sure frotteurs electrique were just round the corner in real life too…
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Most of those are surprisingly accurate, except for the classic mistake of not foreseeing changes in fashion and in methods of propulsion and energy production. Really the only area that is consistently off is the underwater stuff. But even there’s it’s not all of it.
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I mean…France had a lot of nuclear power, and electric heating.
Just missed the middle man.
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