Flying firemen. Radium-heated homes. Robot-assisted architects, tailors, and barbers (eek!). These are the technologies of the year 2000, as envisioned by French illustrator Villemard in a series of beautiful drawings produced in 1910. They are pretty wacky…except when they aren’t.
While Villemard may have given us more credit in the realm of aviation than we deserved—a good half of the drawings in the set involve flying machines that never really panned out—some of his other technological predictions were surprisingly on point. This video-conference setup, for example, isn’t a far cry from some that we use today. Still not letting a robo-barber get anywhere near my noggin, though. [Flickr via BLDG BLOG]
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