[strttn]

The thing I love about these old illustrations that predict the future from long ago in the past is not what they get right but what they get wrong.

They focus on a singular aspect of future technology but due to the limitations of their imagination aren't able to predict other entirely new revolutionary technologies and so default to their current ways of interacting with the new tech.

So for example, they predict the cross-continent visible and audio interaction but use the large unwieldy gramophone style microphone to capture the speech being unable to imagine capturing audio from a tiny electronic device.

In other examples I've seen [1], you see a farmer with his auto-farming machinery but he's using enormous levers to interact with it. And then there's the frequent use cast iron to build some of this "future tech" when of course, not much is made from cast iron these days.

It makes me wonder what things we literally can't imagine about the future now. Or how different technologies that we can imagine could come together to produce entirely new things.

[1] http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year...