The strong impressions from the technical inventions and applications until then shaped the material of the imagination of those who had the time and inclination to predict the future. From the middle of the 19th century, various exhibitions of “industrial achievements,” open to the public in different European capitals, fed the visions (or fears) about the future world. The first of these exhibitions, titled “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” in a huge covered space built for this purpose in Hyde Park, London (and named “Crystal Palace”), in 1851, made a tremendous impression on all its visitors, locals and foreigners alike. More than 6 million people visited that parade of machines. And in the following decades, mechanical and electrical inventions were among the favorite topics of newspapers.
On this page we present a collection of images of the future world, the world as artists (and not only) imagined it in 2000, images that were created from 1890 to 1910. Certainly this fantasy did not prove accurate; technological innovations moved much faster, with leaps and bounds…
(The collection was published by the Russian news agency Sputnik).
