What 19th Century French Artists Thought The Year 2000 Would Look Like
The ways we envision the future are contingent upon our present contexts. And in late 19th century France, an industrial boom had artists anticipating, well, playing croquet underwater.
At the cusp of the 20th century, Jean-Marc Côté and a few other visionary French artists began to speculate as to the coming century might have in store for them and their country. Côté and company mapped these speculations out in a series of drawings, which they would display at the World Exhibition in Paris.
Subsequent use as postcards and cigarette and cigar box inserts would increase the drawings' shelf life, though the prints were never commercially distributed. In fact, Isaac Asimov purchased the only known set of postcards for use in his nonfiction work Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000.