Collectible trading cards, portraying the future, from 1930 Germany.
(via Ace)
Some other predictions about the future…
From France in 1910
From Germany circa 1900
From Seagram’s (!) in the mid-1940s
From Ladies’ Home Journal in 1900
5 thoughts on “The Past of the Future”
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What is interesting is that the artist could imagine smaller more compact “cathode ray tubes” but couldn’t imagine slimmer microphones or speakers.
The most interesting thing about the videophone image, I think, is the two women at the same table but talking to other people. A pretty good forecast of the way wireless phones have actually worked out.
The aircraft in the background has an enclosed operator and passenger cabin, yet the two aviatrixes, presumably, have what appear to be goggles pushed back on their heads. Another example of the artists inability to think through the consequences of the technology.
It’s a little severe to expect some artist to invent a new microphone technology, those would have counted as fairly miniature at the time. How else was he going to show that they were the pilots, especially since they were women.
Full credit for getting the social interaction right, I can’t recall any of the images of future picture phones that did that or anybody that predicted that.
Note the one on New Highways, where the text says “All men and women wear uniform clothing: zipped suits and pants.”
It would be easy to put this down to incipient Nazi feelings, given that these cards came out just 3 years prior to the Hitler takeover…but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same kind of Uniformity emphasis in projections of the future from American and other sources.