When it comes to old predictions of the future, people from the past could never have imagined a world where humans put a man on the Moon, or electric cars that could start with the push of a button. Who could've imagined that everyone would have smart phones that fit in our pockets - devices that...
This one’s got the usual share of the cliché (moon vacations! atomic power!) and the what-were-they-smoking bizarre (the balloon on the horse in the back of that 1800′s German one still has me giggling). But I’d like to draw attention to a few that seem to have been pointing very much in the right direction, even as they miss the mark:
Radio Hat (1949)
Of course you’ll want to listen to music, audio plays, etc. on the go. And how else are you going to fit the antenna and all the needed vacuum tubes? The transistor had only just been invented two years earlier, so of course what they pictured looks like this, and not the iPod.
(Also, is anyone else reminded of Moriya Suwako?)
Farming In The 21st Century (1958)
This one gets props (sorry) for restraint in speculating about the component technologies. Simple electronic machine controls, remote control operation, helicopters…
But then, there’s the assumption that the human operator will need to oversee it all directly via Mark I eyeball, that leads the whole thing astray. That and, perhaps more importantly — and one of the biggest reasons why predictions of impending automation (particularly this kind, not the “Rosey the Robot Maid” kind) have fallen short — the economics. A farmer could do something much like this now… but it’s much cheaper to do it the way we do it instead.
Futuristic Food Delivery (1940s)
Love those milkman uniforms on the delivery men.
Urban restaurants were delivering orders back in the 20′s, but the depression mostly killed that. And there was the aforementioned milk delivery, which was (slowly and unevenly) switching over from horse-drawn to motor vehicles. Mobile lunch wagons, outfitted with sinks and stoves, were serving food in New England back in the 1870′s and 1880′s.
Restaurant delivery did indeed come back — and then some — in the decades after World War II. The Army created and ran “mobile canteens” in the late 1950s. (And the few remaining milkmen still around these days have seen renewed business these last few years with Covid lockdowns.)
But combining it all together, to have the food truck also be the delivery vehicle? So close, and yet so far.
