Old-Timey Visions Of The Year 2000

This post was originally published on March 28, 2011:

Over the weekend, as we wandered aimlessly through the Internet, we stumbled across this amazing set of postcards from 1910. They were designed by a Frenchmen by the name of Villemard, apparently slipped into food packaging in the same way that baseball cards used to be handed out with bubblegum and cigarettes.

Each of the postcards shares a vision of what life in France would look like in the year 2000. And it's crazy how familiar a lot of the scenes are—some because we kind of actually do use the devices he imagined and some because they're full of stuff we're still hoping for. Like, for instance, when the hell are we finally going to get to fly around everywhere all time?

When it comes to fashion, however, Villemard doesn't seem to have expected  it change at all over the 90 years. (Except, you know, for all the people wearing wings.)

We'll post a bunch of our favourite postcards below (click to enlarge) and you can find a few more here, where we found them, at Paleofuture, a rather awesome blog dedicated to exploring past visions of the future.

Firemen putting out a blaze

Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris

Skype

Construction site

Audiobooks in the classroom

Flying policeman

"Car shoes"

An air rescue

"Cars of war"

"A curiosity"

A lady in her bathroom

Posted by Adam Bunch, the Editor-in-Chief of The Little Red Umbrella and the creator of The Toronto Dreams Project. You can read the rest of his posts here or follow him on Twitter here.