22 Incredible Images Show What the Future Looked Like 100 Years Ago

These amazing, almost 100-year old covers of the weekly French magazine Le Petite Journal are from the online collection of the french National Library. They show what were the most exciting innovations of the 1920s, and how people in Europe imagined the future of technology and science.

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The locomotion of tomorrow

Image: Le Petit Journal illustré/Bibliothèque nationale de France

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Image: Le Petit Journal illustré/Bibliothèque nationale de France

The locomotion of tomorrow

Is this true?

Experience artificial lightning

In the vast solitude

Circuit de Touraine

A race between a fast train and a car

Professor Piccard’s magnificent feat

Amphibious tanks

Eclipse

Drama at the bottom of the sea

A fabulous vision

Racing on Mount Revard

The parachute world record

Crossing the Sahara by automobile

Under the sea

The deadly work

Work underwater

Scaphander—a service of justice

Between the sky and the street

Carried away by a torpedo

The heroism of a mechanic airman

Surgeons for balloons