foerstel + piper + martin

victorian visions of the year 2000

071201
Personal Flying Machines

Trying to predict what the future may look like is an obsession with the human race—while the 20th century was actually spent in dreams of space exploration and time travel, people in 1900 had very different ideas about what was going to happen in the next 100 years.
Flushed with the success of the Second Industrial Revolution, people living on the cusp of the century imagined a bright future made possible by mechanical wonders.
Hildebrand, a German chocolate company at that point, created a set of cards that depicts the awesome life that awaited in the year 2000—where railways could be built across the oceans, everyone would have their own flying machines, and houses were mobile.
In hindsight, while life has turned out even more fantastical than envisioned, these quaint ideas of futurism are still pretty great.
House-Moving by Train

The Combined Ship & Railway Locomotive

Undersea Tourist Boats

A Quick Stroll on the Water

The Moving Pavement

Summer Holidays at the North Pole

Televised Outside Broadcasting

Personal Airships

Police X-Ray Surveillance Machine

Roofed Cities

The Weather-Control Machine

[via Design TAXI]

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