Welcome to the Paleofuture blog, where we explore past visions of the future. From flying cars and jetpacks to utopias and dystopias.
All in 1900s
What happens to news in the future if all the media outlets you used to watch, read, and listen to go away? What will replace the newspapers and the websites and your local TV channel? Those are the questions facing a lot of people who are witnessing an upheaval in media that feels enormous. And the answer, if history is any guide, is that it’s entirely possible nothing could replace them. The future might just be filled with a lot less news and in a form you don’t necessarily love.
When the health care company DocGo announced in 2022 it would be rolling out a new all-electric ambulance for transporting patients, promotional materials billed it as America’s first electric ambulance. And while that assertion wouldn’t necessarily seem immediately suspect to anyone alive today, since our lives have largely been dominated by the internal combustion engine, that would certainly be news to people at the turn of the 20th century. Because the electric ambulance is probably way older than you’d guess.
Swiss doctor Camille Redard received worldwide press in 1905 after he announced a new anaesthetic for dental surgery that was supposed to make everything completely painless. The good doctor simply put a powerful blue light over the patient’s head, wrapped in a dark fabric. And it aroused “considerable interest” in the medical community. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on everyone, as some doctors reported back at the time.
If you ask any random American off the street what color is for boys and what color is for girls, you’ll likely hear that blue is masculine and pink is feminine. But it hasn’t always been that way. In fact, 100 years ago it was just the opposite. And if you take a step back to think about how subjective our modern ideas of color really are, it opens up new ways of looking at potential blind spots when we think about our future.
Mention the Ford Motor Company’s early years and many Americans will probably think about the innovation of the assembly line or the $5 work day. But there’s one aspect of Ford’s strategy in the 1910s that isn’t remembered much in the popular imagination anymore: Movies.
How would the people of 1910 be able to keep their phone conversations private, so that someone sitting nearby couldn’t hear them? Amazingly, someone came up with an invention to solve precisely that problem, but it seems like it would’ve been absolutely ridiculous to use in practice.
The internet is filled with fraudulent health claims of people who claimed they cured cancer with tumeric or fought covid-19 by drinking bleach. But newspapers and magazines of the early 20th century had plenty of equally ridiculous claims. And one tech magazine sought to expose these medical frauds, all considered high tech swindles at the time.
A horrifying magnitude 7.9 earthquake hit Japan on September 1, 1923, killing over 140,000 people. And while news of the devastation reached newspapers around the world by the next day, there was no way to get film footage from Japan to the United States that quickly. But that didn’t stop filmmakers from making fake films to show in theaters around the U.S.—like a fake newsreel of the earthquake in Japan that was rushed to theaters in a matter of days.
What did kids from the year 1904 think would happen by the year 1919 or even the year 2019? They imagined fancy airships in the sky, “automobiles for everything,” and wondrous house-cleaning robots. They even imagined trips to Mars by the year 1919.
You’ve probably heard about Thomas Edison’s infamous 1903 film where he electrocuted an elephant. It’s just as horrifying as you’d imagine. But fewer people know that this wasn’t actually Edison’s first electrocution film. Two years earlier, in 1901, he produced a film re-enacting a famous execution. Perversely, it also served as a national advertisement for one of Edison’s latest inventions, the electric chair.
Humanoid robots are still relatively primitive here in the 21st century. Sure, we have Roombas that can vacuum our floors and Boston Dynamics robots that are doing backflips. But when it comes to the dream of our own personal robot servant, we’re still in the Dark Ages.
We’re all familiar with Nikola Tesla and his brilliant work helping to invent the electric technologies that we live with today. But did you know that there’s a guy named Thomas Edison who also helped invent some of that tech? If you didn’t, you should check out the new trailer for the upcoming movie, The Current War.
From tracking down teen hackers of the 1980s who are now living on the street, to investigating the myths behind the original self-help business guru, we looked at a lot of different stories in 2016. We even kept up my obsession with movies that have been screened by American presidents at the White House.
Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich. In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it’s the untold story of Hill’s fraudulent business practices, tawdry sex life, and membership in a New York cult that makes him so fascinating.
X-ray imagery is obviously taken for granted in medicine here in the 21st century. But at the turn of the 20th century, x-rays opened up an entirely new world.
When prominent pilots were dying in the 1900s, some people started to wonder if aviation really had a future.
Time capsules can be pretty boring. But time capsule nerds like me live for those rare capsules with something really cool inside. This year we saw time capsules filled with the weird, the rare, and the surprising. One thing that so many of 2015’s time capsules had in common: Lots of booze.
The internet is a big place. There’s so much to read and watch and listen to that it can be overwhelming. We all have those stories that we start, get distracted for one reason or another, and promise ourselves we’ll finish later. Well, if any of those stories were on Paleofuture, here’s your second chance!
With each new mode of transportation, Santa Claus has gotten an upgrade. In the 1890s, Santa got an automobile. Then in the 1900s he got flying machines. In the 1950s he even got a rocket ship. Today, Santa gets around on a hoverboard.
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