Dream of the future, and you’re sure to get something that tells you more about the past. Here is a set of postcards from 1900, illustrating what they thought life would be like in 2000. It looks like a kind of steampunk opium dream, with everyone dressed in Victorian fashion, either puttering about outside with parasols or standing about in cluttered drawing rooms. All of the inventions are weirdly off in a charming way.
For instance, they foresaw television, sort of. I guess that might be a kind of LCD home projection system—we don’t make them out of bakelight, though, and I can’t quite picture us all standing around holding handsets to our ears to hear what’s going on.
Now this one is really nifty. We get a laugh out of Gernsback era visions of a future with flying cars, all streamlined and equipped with fins and bubble domes, but the 1900 version of the same is a little more sedate and bucolic: we’d all have our own personal zeppelins. The whole family would climb into a little wicker basket and loft gently into the air, and then the little propellor would whirl and you’d waft off to your destination. It all looks so very civilized.
I’m intrigued by the ornithopterish things in the background, too. I never did get my own personal zeppelin, or my own personal ornithopter, or my own personal flying Buick. We’ve been ripped off by the future … although I will admit that we’ve got much better home entertainment systems than they imagined.
Don’t worry about the flying cars because someday, we will all have mecha.
Summer Holidays at the North Pole, oddly prescient.
You can get your own personal helicopter though, which is much better than all of their flying devices. The future is never quite what people think it will be, no matter how smart and informed they are. Predictions are always wrong.
It’s 2007.
Where’s my goddamned blimp?
I was promised flying blimps, and I want mine now.
I have a collection of science fiction novels written in the 50s, 60s and 70s. One thing that seems never to have been predicted is the equalisation of rights and roles for women (well, at least comparatively.) Odd that faster-than-light travel and its repercussions was conceivable, yet a woman who wasn’t a secretary, fainting at the first sign of trouble seemed to be beyond envisioning.
Those are great.
It’s interesting that of the available cards, some have come true, some cannot be, some we no longer seem to want (like the walking on water things … ) and some of the things we’ve got could not possibly have been imagined.
Police X-Ray Surveillance Machine, oddly prescient.
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I love the big floppy propeller in the bottom card, and the cordial doffing of hats: “Greetings, Professor Myers! Lovely day for a sky outing, what?” The discrete little safety rail is a nice touch, too.
But the woman in red in the top postcard, sitting in that dissipated, unladylike pose — scandalous. I’m sure she’s on laudanum.
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The Cosmopolitan, vol. XIV, pages 450-458
February 1893
“JUNE, 1993.” by Julian Hawthorne.
http://capecodhistory.us/19th/June1993.htm
The flying-machine has made war impractical, and families live happy, self-sufficient lives on their dispersed homsteads.
Funny, they correctly predicted advertisements on blimps. I mean, it’s not Goodyear, but now I’m kinda hungry for German chocolate…
When you think about it, the changes in the United States from 1900 to 1950 were some of the largest ever recorded. I’m thinking of the following that did not really exist in 1900 and did in 1950:
Ubiquitous automobile travel.
Not uncommon air travel.
Ubiquitous radio, and a little television.
America going from a regional power to a world power.
Ubiquitous telephone service.
Ubiquitous indoor plumbing–think toilets instead of outhouses.
Ubiquitous electricity, with all the domestic appliances that go along with that, like refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, etc.
Plenty of movie theatres.
Being involved in two large multinational wars and coming out relatively unscathed, especially compared to Europe or Asia.
My point is that if you somehow magically took someone from America in 1950 and plopped them down in America in 2000, they would pretty much know about the things they would see with the exception of computers and video games. Which, when you get down to it, really aren’t necessary (I say this as a computer programmer.) If you took someone from America in 1900 and magically plopped them down in America in 1950, I would imagine they would experience a huge culture shock. Or even better, try going the other way. Chances are, a 2000 American can survive just fine in 1950 America, but a 1950 American would have to make a HUGE lifestyle change to survive in 1900 America.
The point of this whole long rant? That predictions about the future tend to think about the changes brought about by the first half of the twentieth century, not so much the second half. That can lead us to completely over and under estimate the effects of changes.
That mecha is just sad, you can see the thin sheet metal rattling and how can you aim a gatling gun that is about to fall off… A mecha is worthless without jump jets!
I still want a Spinner. Is anyone working on antigrav drives yet????
And no the Mohler Car does not count! That thing is a joke.
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Anyone remember “party lines”? Our phone line in the mid-1950s, in Mobile, Alabama, was shared with something like 6 other households. Literally, we were all hooked up to the same line. When the phone rang, you had to wait to see if it was “your” ring. When you picked up the phone to make a call, you’d often find someone already talking on it, and would have to wait several minutes for a free line. And sometimes, when you were on the phone yourself, you’d hear someone pick up and listen in on your conversation, audibly breathing. “Hang up, Mrs. Stanfield, this is a private conversation!”
The past was weird.
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Brownian –
If I recall correctly, there was general equality of the sexes in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which was from the late 50s. I’m sure there are other examples… when did Asimov write his robot stories starring Susan Calvin, for example?
Class and sex role shifts may be the harder ones to predict.
Just after the Apollo landings I asked my grandfather the Wisconsin dairy farmer about what change of all the ones he had seen since he had started farming in 1917 with horses and steam power, wood heat, etc. had been the most surprising.
“Farmers playing golf.”
Brownian writes: “One thing that seems never to have been predicted is the equalisation of rights and roles for women…”
Check out one of Heilein’s earliest works, “For Us the Living.” Radial economics combined with universal self-determination and free love in the bargain! Too bad the writing sucks…
If you liked those see also this:
http://davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm
Re: comments #5 & #14
Heinlein also wrote a story in the 1940’s (IIRC)about the 1st female engineer on the space station that was in construction. Also see the short story _Omnilingual_ by H. Beam Piper, from about 1960 in which the protagonist is a female archeologist on Mars trying to decipher the written language of the extinct Martians.
These may be exceptions, but some male SF writers were considering such things.
We were promised space. They told us that we would be living in space. I want my damn spaceship and I want my damn moon colony. My generation was given the moon and I want it right damn now.
I remember a SF story I read in the 70’s. The spaceship’s captain had a secretary who sat on his knee, & he used a slide-rule for calculations.
How dumb! It should’ve been tha navigator doing tha calculations.
Some of this stuff reminds me of The Palm Beach Story, (1942) in which Joel McCrae tries to find a backer for his invention: An airport suspended on cables over Manhattan.
Starship Troopers (the book) was extremely segregated. Only women could be pilots, only men could be grunts, no contact between the genders on ship, etc. That said, I don’t remember the civilian society very well.
Heinlein’s women were all sexbots. Sure, they could pilot and spy and be spunky and all that, and they were perpetually horny, ready to drop trou as soon as the nearest man issued a sidelong, speculative glance. Feh.
Wow! Now that’s an eggcorn! Bakelite just has the “mineral” ending, like kryptonite.
Aaah… the slide-rule… “the symbol of the worker will not be the hammer [or whatever it was], but the slide-rule”…
Wow! Now that’s an eggcorn! Bakelite just has the “mineral” ending, like kryptonite.
Aaah… the slide-rule… “the symbol of the worker will not be the hammer [or whatever it was], but the slide-rule”…
What about movies? Have you never seen “Queen of Outer Space” with Zsa Zsa Gabor or “CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON.”
My generation must have been the last to have to learn the slide rule…in 10th-grade chemistry Mr. Greenway* had a gigantoid demonstration model in front of the room and we all had to slide our little sliders on those log scales. On exams we were allowed to use (4-function) calculators (remember those little red LED numbers?) but not everybody had one so we could share. Ha! My friend Scott’s had a memory function (!) and we could pass our answers back & forth to confirm calculations. Or, I mean, we could have, if we wanted to, which we didn’t…heh. My dad was a chemist so he had a really fancy slide rule with all kinds of extra sliders and scales on it, very impressive, as well as a little one he kept clipped to his shirt pocket with his pen.
[/nostalgia]
* motto: “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Greenway!,” which I never understood–doesn’t that mean his way wasn’t the right one?
“Heinlein also wrote a story in the 1940’s (IIRC)about the 1st female engineer on the space station that was in construction.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delilah_and_the_Space_Rigger
“We are living in the future
Tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago
We’re all riding rocket ships
And talking with our minds
Wearing turquoise jewelry
And stading in soup lines”
John Prine, Living in the Future
I bought a slide rule my freshman year in college (1968) in preparation for the mandatory (for math/science majors) sophomore slide rule class. ’68 was the last year for that class. I still have the slide rule.
I was trying to explain what a slide rule was to the neighbor’s daughter (25).
Me: “Before they had calculators they used manual devices.”
Her: “An abacus?”
Steampunk? So the world is going to end up looking like “The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne?” I love that show!
SO AWESOME.
Steampunk. And octopuses. Is there any question why I love this blog?
Yes, I was probably the last generation of engineer/science college students to use a slide rule routinely. I had the large and small Pickett slide rules, the small pocket one is probably the same one CCP is talking about.
Anyway, I ended up majoring in Physics in the end. By the time HP scientific calculators came along, I was in Junior year and we were not doing many numerical calcualations at that point. It was all greek symbols and the like. So I never actually bought one.
The one thing that the slide rule did for me was to build a very quick mental facility for order of magnitude calculations. There are ways of counting the “slides” of the cursor on a slide rule so you can place the decimal point right, but no one ever learns it.
Anyway, the old Pickett is in my personal museum of paleotechnology along side the Western Electric Telegraph Sounder.
I was another one that started college using a slip-stick then moved on to an HP 25( programable w/o continuous memory). For a while I was collecting slide rules, was up to 14 of them. At some point I lost them in one of the moves.
Speaking about the 1900’s, I have always been amazed at what my grandmother witnessed during her lifetime. She was born in the 1880’s and died in the 1970’s. She literally went from horse and buggies to watching a man land on the moon. To me she had in a very real way “saw it all”.
Damn. I keep forgetting to never use the word ‘never’.
Back in the wacky bubbly nineties I tried very hard to get my boss to let us buy a “small” blimp for deliveries. We could have kept it tethered to the roof of our building in sunnyvale, then loaded the media and buzzed off to Webvan or whoever was wasting millions on the “first mover advantage”. Once there, we could lower their product in a basket (a good order might take a couple passes) and shout a hearty “Ahoy!” and head back to base.
I think it would have brought orders at any cost just to see the delivery…
mikey
They used their imaginations as best they could given what they knew at the time. In form, if not specific function, they weren’t always that far off. Another thing that threw off their vision a bit was the increasing use of rubber and plastics as basic construction material in ways they never would’ve dreamed of in 1900.
Anyone read _The Victorian Internet_ by Tom Standage?
It’s all about the hype and hoopla that surrounded the rise of the telegraph in the late 19th century, and it has some eerie resonances with the dot-com boom & bust of the 1990s.
Also just finished _Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ recently, an autobiography of sorts by Bill Bryson, about his growing up in 1950s Des Moines, Iowa.
History is my favorite subject, especially with gems like these cards to explore—thanks for sharing, PZ.
Women in science fiction. In the ‘Dan Dare’ in the Eagle in the early 1950’s one of the protagonists was a Professor Jocelyn Peabody, slated for a trip to Venus. One of the others was Sir Hubert Guest who was disgusted when he found out that the Professor was a woman. Everyone else took his attitude with amusement. However, he was a male chauvinist of the old-fashioned gentlemanly school insisting on `protecting’ her, which she didn’t need and eventually he accepted her as part of the team. (After one incident the Professor remarked, “Things had got so bad the Sir Hubert nearly forgave me for being a woman.”)
She turned up in later adventures, never the “little woman” and always taking a positive role. For example, she quelled a riot on a space station, was thought killed after a heroic action, discovered the clue that saved Earth and participated in the actual saving.
Digby’s Aunt Anastasia, a dragon of a woman, played such an important part that Dan Dare later named his personal space ship after her.
On one occasion a woman was depicted as a news-reader on television. In those days news-readers were always men and always wore dinner suits. (On radio as well as television.)
It was impossible for a woman to fill such an important role.
OK, it was a boys’ comic and tended to push the male role models, but women were represented as being able to do anything that men can. This was over 50 years ago and the comic may have been ahead of its time, but I have always accepted this as characteristic of science fiction, in spite of Robert Heinlein.
No personal flying Buick? Count your blessings, PZ.
Can’t you just imagine the terror of trying to get a three-dimensional traffic jam down on to a two-dimensional landing field?
The dirigible airship existed in 1900, so the prediction for family airships (instead of family cars) was really only a prediction of application, rather than far-sighted vision.
It would be very interesting, actually, to see what a technological society would do if it were not permitted to evolve its technology beyond what was possible when Victoria took her last breath. To what extent might inventive and sophisticated applications of “old” technology compensate for the lack of ability to advance? To what extent does this represent an advance in itself?
I’ll never forget what SF author Frank Herbert said in a radio interview he gave in Adelaide once: “His (Jules Verne’s) machines looked like the machines of his time, not (like) the machines of our time.” Herbert wondered whether his own machines (in the Dune novels) would cause the same ‘hilarity’ when viewed from a future perspective.
One of the subway stations in Paris is decorated with murals of these sorts of pictures of what the year 2000 would be like. It’s a fun and amusing display. :D
Rats, sorry about the formatting in that last post.
Dan Simmons gave a wonderful talk at Philcon some years back. IIRC he quoted someone saying that anyone could look at the first horseless carriage and foresee cars, but that it would have taken an SF writer to foresee traffic jams. Simmons replied that no, any competent engineer could have predicted traffic jams. It would have taken a talented visionary to foresee the sexual revolution brought on by the automobile giving teenagers and young adults a way to get away from the parents and have some privacy.
In that talk, he also explained why “Independence Day” was such an awful movie. He said it was like the US deciding to invade a tiny Pacific island populated by a primitive tribe. But instead of lobbing cruise missiles over the horizon, the Navy decided to pile the entire fleet up onto the beach. And to coordinate the attack, they took over the natives’ smoke signal network.
The worst about Independence Day (apart from, if not before, the patriotism, and the matter-of-factness with which the president’s daughter inherits the president’s role) is the computer virus. Ever seen a platform-independent computer virus? Now imagine a platform that is “not only weirder than we suppose, but weirder than we can suppose”…
Or have I way underestimated the power and might of His Billness?
*background: MUA HA HA HA HAAAAAH…*
The worst about Independence Day (apart from, if not before, the patriotism, and the matter-of-factness with which the president’s daughter inherits the president’s role) is the computer virus. Ever seen a platform-independent computer virus? Now imagine a platform that is “not only weirder than we suppose, but weirder than we can suppose”…
Or have I way underestimated the power and might of His Billness?
*background: MUA HA HA HA HAAAAAH…*
Because Heinlein has been mentioned so much, here are his predictions from 1950 for 2000.
Because Heinlein has been mentioned so much, here are his predictions from 1950 for 2000.
David Marjanović:
Yes: a lot of the cross-site scripting exploits in circulation today are arguably platform- (or at least OS-) independent. Or the MS Word macro viruses from some years ago, since Word macros behave the same way on all machines. Or even Emacs’s one and only mail virus from the early 1990s. Granted, they may not be platform-independent if you define “platform” to mean “JavaScript” or “MS Word” or “Emacs Lisp”, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that someone had written malware that can exploit several different platforms, like the Morris worm.
Greg Egan once wrote a story about so-called Monte Carlo viruses, used in biological warfare. They mutated very quickly, the result being that no two people had the same disease, so each infection required a separate medical research program.
I suppose someone could write a computer virus or worm that uses mutation and natural selection to discover new exploits and foil the efforts of security folks. Given enough time, such a beast might also find a hole in AlienOS’s defenses.
…What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free…
I.G.Y. by Donald Fagen (1982)
Brownian: It seems in general predicting gadgets was easier than predicting social changes. Think of all the SF with a 21st century USSR.
Has no one here read any of the E. E. “Doc” Smith books? I’m thinking of the “Lensman” series, the “Skylark of Space” series, “Spacehounds of the IPC”, “Galaxy Primes”? All of the significant women characters, while quintessentially feminine, were inherently tough. Yes, the dominant roles were (mostly) held by the men, but the women were largely strong-willed partners. And, unlike the Heinlein description I see here, they were not promiscuous, but kept themselves chaste until marriage, with a few exceptions. Yes, they did occasionally have to be rescued (when outnumbered and kidnapped), but were more often seen patching up the hero after he’s been shredded (“Lensman”), going into battle beside him (“Skylark”), doing the hunting and exploring while he builds a hyper-radio to call for help after a crash on Ganymede (“Spacehounds”), or telepathically backing him up with (nearly) equal power (“Primes”)! And those are just the human females…
IIRC, these were written in the 40s.