Flying Fire Fighters (And Other Things That Didn’t Come To Pass)

Flying firemen. Radium-heated homes. Robot-assisted architects, tailors and barbers (eek!). These are the technologies of the year 2000, as envisioned by French illustrator Villemard in a series of beautiful drawings produced in 1910. They are pretty wacky…except when they aren’t.

While Villemard may have given us more credit in the realm of aviation than we deserved – a good half of the drawings in the set involve flying machines that never really panned out – some of his other technological predictions were surprisingly on point. This video-conference setup, for example, isn’t a far cry from some that we use today. Still not letting a robo-barber get anywhere near my noggin, though. [Flickr via BLDG BLOG]