A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

The Public Domain Review has a series of wonderful illustrations from around 1900, imagining the then future year 2000. As you will see, people hoped for aerial firemen, underwater fish-riding races and whale buses. While the illustrations are fun to look at, you can’t help but admit that most of them are not too far off on a conceptual level. What can be learnt from that: When we try to imagine the future, we tend to extrapolate current technology and underestimate major disruptions. But then again, heck, they even saw batman coming, fighting his kins in cars.