Jeff Knapp, reference and
instruction librarian,
Penn State Altoona
Just Browsing: A Picture is Worth . . .
Jeff Knapp, Eiche Library, Penn State Altoona
The future is always so full of promise—exciting possibilities and new inventions always await us. Robots, jetpacks, and interplanetary travel will be common and our meals will be consumed in pill form. That is, this is true for as long as the future remains in the future. The problem with these scenarios comes when that future actually arrives, and the inhabitants of that future look back on the visions of their forebears, and they turn out to be less than accurate.
There is a really great blog that chronicles examples of past images of the future is Paleo-Future. Here you’ll find articles and pictures from old newspapers, books, and magazines that speculate on what the future will be like: From a 1950 issue of the Lumberton, NC Robesonian: “The woman of the year 2000 will be an outsize Diana, . . . more than six feet tall, wear a size 11 shoe, have shoulders like a wrestler and muscles like a truck driver. She . . . probably will compete with men athletes in football, baseball, prizefighting and wrestling.”
Another great blog for this kind of content is Modern Mechanix, which snags its content from the pages of old copies of Modern Mechanix, Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics magazines. I find a great deal of irony in many of these posts—an item from 1939 entitled “Vest-Pocket Telephones” states that “A telephone that can be carried about and used anywhere . . . is a possibility in the near future.” What I find ironic is that the average reader in 1939 was likely thinking, “A telephone in my vest pocket? That’s ridiculous!,” whereas the average reader today would think, “People wore vests?”
Not all visions of the future were that far off, however. This 1967 film from the Philco-Ford Corporation (remember them?) has actually been considered a hoax by some—because of all things it got right. It stars game show host Wink Martindale, and foreshadows things like online shopping, banking, and email. Looking back on it now, I find it humorous at the things that are never considered as capable of change. Even in a film that gets so much of the technology right, the gender roles of the characters are still stuck in 1967: the husband, a hardworking salaryman, winces as he reviews the online receipts of his stay-at-home wife’s shopping habits.
Finally, no discussion of futures of the past would be complete without mention of World’s Fairs. These exhibitions were almost entirely about what the future would be like and were a treasure trove of futuristic content. A great place to find content about past World’s Fairs, particularly the 1939 and 1964 fairs in New York, is simply through Google searches, or for film clips, search YouTube.
Cheers everyone, and Happy Browsing!
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