Future Imagined in the Past

25 Pictures Showing How People in the Past Imagined the Future!

 

It’s always fun to dig up pictures from the past, be it early photos, the 1st versions of popular tech devices, or historical milestones captured on film. After all, vintage photos can reveal the most incredible details about the world of the distant past. In this article, we’d like to take a deep dive into one specific subject - futuristic inventions. Let’s see how the people of the past imagined the life of future generations and find out whether some of their imaginative predictions actually came true with these 25 vintage pictures.

1. A helicopter cab, something we really need in big cities these days with all that traffic

2. This is how people imagined the fashion of 1950 in 1914, the cover of Life Magazine

3. An illustration from the 1940s depicting home shopping

4. Glasses with a built-in radio, a 1972 illustration from a Soviet magazine

5. A version of a 1930 StreamLine KJ Henderson motorcycle

6. An unfinished prototype of the Nazi all-wing jet aircraft called the Horten Ho 229 V3

7. A 1934 illustration of the mobile home of tomorrow, a truly catastrophic idea

8. A Space Age desk design by Jean Leleu, 1969

9. A railplane system designed in 1930 by George Bennie

10. Well-rounded living it is! Another mobile home design featured on the 'Science and Mechanics' magazine cover, 1961

11. A flying bus concept from 1946

12. A 1949 photo of the Tomorrow-Cycle, the supposed bicycle of the future

13. An illustration of a radio-controlled police robot (1924)

14. A Morse code signaling set called the ‘Space Station’ from the 1950s 

15. 1942 concept design of a mobile phone on planes by General Electric

16. A luxury air-conditioned lawn mower prototype from the 1950s

17. Propeller powered troops on skis from the November 1939 cover of 'Popular Science Magazine'

18. A proposed design of an American Airlines coach lounge from the 1970s, something we're still waiting for

19. The design of an atomic coffee machine, an item that wouldn't exactly fly off the shelves these days...

20. A 1967 idea of future fashion, Space Man and Space Girl from 'Tomorrowland' (1967)

21. A typewriter-desk-chair design at the Business Efficiency Exhibition, 1971

22. A concept model of the 1951 Studebaker Manta-Ray vehicle

23. So-called bird scooters, an illustration from 1960

24. A 1925 illustration of how medical diagnosis by radio would work, note the robot hands

25. At least we can proudly say that this futuristic idea became reality. A 1946 illustration of a flat-screen TV from Seagram’s 'Beyond Tomorrow' ad series