JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1646   [Part of the  History of the Future Series]

This entry is a simple exhibit of French postcards from the edge–of the near-future.  The future that they spoke to wasn’t all that far away standards of change in the history of history–they called out to a history 85 years away from 1900, 85 years to the great beginning of where the future would take new and entirely different steps up from Victorian discovery and breakthroughs.   There are some novel intuitions, including electrically-induced knowledge, production-line robotics, and television, but overall the thinking being done and displayed on these postcards wasn’t very edgy.

Electricity, perhaps the defining improvement of the 19th century, would still be a main source of power and energy, though with new and incredible products. For example , the classroom in the year 2000 would distill information directly into the minds of students by some sort of electrically-based information crunching apparatus, which would evidently grind the good stuff from the pages of books and be electrically implanted directly into the brain.  Why the machine was manually operated is a mystery.

Artificial or synthetic food–or food, at least, as we do not recognize it now, here being consumed like vitamins.  Even though the food-ness of food is gone, the social ambition of replacing spent energy resources has not changed, the coming-together at the dining table remaining intact as a practice even without the demand of the time it once took to actually eat food. [Image source and notes, below.]