How do you imagine things will look like one hundred years from now? Minority Report-style interfaces? Teleportation? Universal translators? Or perhaps space colonies… It’s hard to make predictions, right?
100 years ago, French artist Villemard did just that, in a magnificent collection of postcards which Vivento brought to our attention some days ago. They provide a delightful glimpse into the imagination of our great-grandparents, and what they thought the future would look like in the year 2000. The postcards are currently owned by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, who suggests they might have been used to accompany food products, similar to Hildebrand’s chocolate packaging.
Some predictions were rather accurate, others… not so much. Take a look:
An operator would sit in its cubicle, while machines would break rocks and assemble a building.
Firemen had wings to better fight fires!
In the school, books were somehow processed in a machine (with a hand-powered crank) and then transmitted to students.
A chemical dinner – it’s funny how a meal was portrayed in a very elaborate and formal setting, even if food had been condensed into pills and could technically be swallowed in 2 seconds…
At the tailor, measurements would be mechanically taken, and a machine would then produce a suit from rolls of fabric.
Interestingly, some things weren’t going to to change all that much in Villemard’s imagination… like fashion sense! :)
The collection consists of 25 postcards, and they’re all fascinating – with lots of flying machines! You can check them out on Tom Wigley’s set on Flickr.