In 100 years, there will be flying taxis and people will travel to the moon routinely. Knowledge will be instilled into students through wires attached to their heads. These may sound like the predictions of modern-day futurists, but they’re how people a century ago saw the future–otherwise known to you and me as the present.
These vintage European postcards illustrate a view of the 21st century that is remarkably prescient in some ways and hilariously wrong in others, says Ed Fries, who selected them from his private collection.
In the 10 years since he left Microsoft, where he was co-founder of the Xbox project, Fries has worked on what he calls “a random collection of futuristic projects.” He’s advised or served on the board of companies working on 3-D printing, depth-sensing cameras (like those used in Kinect), and headsets for reading brain waves. Earlier this month, he presented some of his favorite postcards at a neurogaming conference in San Francisco, using them to illustrate pitfalls in predicting the future that remain relevant today.
One thing you see in the cards is a tendency to assume some things won’t change, even though they undoubtedly will. In one image, a couple flags down an aerotaxi. That’s futuristic enough, but the man is wearing spats and carrying a cane, while she has a parasol and an enormous hat with a feather. Did they really think transportation would undergo a revolution while fashion stayed frozen in time? “In every one of these you see a mix of a futuristic concept with stuff that looks to us to be very old fashioned,” Fries said.
At the same time, there’s virtually no hint in the postcards of the truly transformative technologies of the last century–namely personal computers and the internet. Sure, there are video phones, but the image is projected on a screen or a wall. Moving pictures were just coming into existence, Fries says, so that wasn’t a huge leap. But the idea of a screen illuminated from within seems to have been beyond their imagination.
All in all, people at the turn of the 20th century did a pretty good job of extrapolating the technology of their time, Fries says. But their imagination was limited by the world they lived in. The same is true today–at least for those of us who aren’t the visionaries of tomorrow.
Fries thinks what sets those farsighted people apart has something to do with ignoring conventional wisdom. “The future is changed by people who have a crazy idea and follow it wherever it may lead,” he said. “That’s why I like hanging out with wacky people like at that neurogaming conference. One of them is probably going to change the world.”
View the cards in fullscreen mode for the best view. We had to omit a few of his favorites (including the classroom brain stimulator, alas) for copyright reasons. They’re in a book by Isaac Asimov called Future Days: A Nineteenth-Century Vision of the Year 2000, but you can also see them in this YouTube video of his talk.(above)
By Greg Miller
Pictures and story with thanks to Wired
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