A 19th Century View On The Year 2000

Recently I stumbled upon a post about Isaac Asimov's postcard collection. He was in possession of the only known collection of a set of French, 19th century postcards that depict their idea of the future in the year 2000.
Here are some of the more interesting ideas they had at that time.

They came pretty close with this one. The zeppelin idea has never broken through, but the rest is not too far off.

Very little was known about the oceans, and the book '20.000 leagues under the sea' by Jules Verne was just released. The artist movements of that time included avant-garde and surrealism, which shows in these pictures.

My guess for this one is too much opium and absynth. Remember, this is created in the time that heroin was invented and fairly accessible. Absynth still had its active ingredient as well. Those were some trippy times!

This happened, although the fashion definitely changed dramatically over 120 years. Do people still wear clogs?

We have complete digital orchestras, but automating it still proves tricky. The beauty of music is hard to capture without any human input.

Maybe we are not that far of this one, the current research on neural interfaces is progressing fast. The more we learn about the brain and how to interface with it, the closer we are to having skills and knowledge implanted in our brains.

It's a whale bus! Please someone turn this into a steemit meme. The picture is public domain so go nuts on it :)

A less far-fetched reality

This picture was featured in a 1906 issue of 'Punch' magazine. Make the telegraph boxes a bit smaller and a digital screen, and you arrive at present day's smartphone dominated society. It's interesting to see that even 100 years ago people were already worrying about the decline of human interaction through technology.

Sources:
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_L'An_2000