Clearly, not all the French living in 1900 were quite as prescient as Jules Verne – though how cool would it be to live in a world of bat-like firemen and whale buses? How efficient for schoolmasters to dump books into a meat-grinder and have knowledge transmitted directly into students’ brains? And how useful for children to have the ability to rob an eagle’s nest?

Interesting that so many of these automated schemes involve someone having to supervise by pressing many buttons or manipulating levers (for example, the barber and the beauty station). It would seem as much trouble as simply performing the tasks the old-fashioned way – which, come to think of it, is probably why they never caught on.

The outlook for theater orchestras, however, seems eerily prescient. View these breathtaking prognostications here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/04/what-people-in-1900-thought-the-year-2000-would-look-like/?tid=sm_tw