historyThe Public Domain Review1900 · Paris, France
Paper postcards from 1900 imagined daily life in the year 2000
A set of French fin-de-siècle cards, commissioned by Armand Gervais and drawn by Jean-Marc Côté for the 1900 Paris World Exhibition, showed how people then imagined 2000. Some predictions were remarkably accurate, such as incubators for chicken eggs, automated tailoring and combine harvesters. Others were wildly off, including propellers on everyday vehicles, radium fireplaces and a whale bus. Gervais died in 1899 during production, and the cards sat in storage for decades before being rediscovered and republished by Isaac Asimov in 1986.
The cards were designed to be inserted in cigarette boxes and later sent as postcards, which made futuristic images a form of mass entertainment. Artists extended existing machines and trends, such as mechanised farming and electrical experiments, into an imagined future.
The cards show that accurate forecasts tend to come from industrial trends that were already visible, such as farming and factories, while personal life was harder to predict. Their misses, like nautical fantasies and propellers, reveal how futurists extend the technology of their own day. The set is a window onto Belle Époque optimism about science.
Future predictions usually extrapolate current technology, a pattern seen in later predictions about flying cars and robot housekeepers. Accurate forecasts tend to be about industrial change, while social life is harder to predict.
Asimov republished the cards in his 1986 book Futuredays, after they were found by the Canadian writer Christopher Hyde in a Paris shop.
Image: The Public Domain Review
