July 31, 2012 5:00 pm
Could a Whale-Powered Bus Be the Future of Transportation?
A French postcard issued around 1900, predicting La France’s future. Photo: WikiCommons
Well, perhaps not. But visionary postcard artists like Jean-Marc Côté are allowed to dream. As the Public Domain Review points out, Côté and others illustrated around 90 of fanciful cards between 1899 to 1910 that imagined what the future held in store for France in the year 2000. Amongst their predictions were flying fire fighters and postmen, books that can be loaded directly into students’ brains and underwater croquet. Of course, they also envisioned machines that automatically cleaned laundry and aviation police, ideas that turned out not to be so crazy after all.
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