20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The Original Silent Film

While the most renowned of the adaptations of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney's 1954 film starring James Mason and Kirk Douglas is not the first time the Nautilus sailed onto the silver screen. On the contrary, the first major adaptation of Jules Verne's classic Scientific Romance premiered at Chicago's Studebaker Theatre on October 9th, 1916. The greatest novelty the film had to offer audiences of the time, however, was as "the first submarine photoplay ever filmed."

The process of underwater photography was still a recent invention by Ernest and George Williamson, who created the "Williamson Tube" device and personally supervised the filming of 20,000 Leagues. Being a new technology, the underwater sequences were the standard experimental fare... Rather than pushing themselves to thrill audiences, just being able to see the sea floor was thrill enough and the major underwater sequence is more of a travelogue. From the viewing portal on the Nautilus, the characters watch in amazement as Captain Nemo points out sponges, sharks and barracuda.

While it is easy to be facetious about it now that underwater photography is only a Discovery Channel away, there was a timeless flaw with the filming in 20,000 Leagues: the sequences were filmed in the lagoons of the Bahamas, which, with the technology at hand, didn't look particularly appealing. No doubt many a person watching the film for the first time thought that the ocean bottom was decidedly unattractive. However, recognizing the innovation made and allowing oneself to get caught up in the antiquity more than makes up for it.

The story itself is a combination of Verne's Nemo cycle: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. In fact, it is really more an adaptation of latter than of the former. The main body of the plot is lifted from The Mysterious Island and it is in the context of that where most of the action occurs. This version also explores the origins of Captain Nemo more deeply than later versions, and retains his ambiguously East Indian ethnicity.

Unfortunately though, sacrifices have to be made. There is no giant squid battle in this version, and many of the characters are rendered superfluous... Ned Land and Professor Arronax serve no useful purpose except to introduce us to Nemo. The balloonists of The Mysterious Island serve a bit more of a purpose, but overall there is the sense that everyone on ship and on land are as much spectators of the central drama of Nemo as the people watching the film in nickelodeons.

It is also worth noting that the credibility of this and other early submarine films were helped along by the Great War waging in Europe and on the high seas. Submarine warfare was making headlines almost daily, so the prognostications of Verne were especially relevant at this time, even if 20,000 Leagues discreetly chose not to fully explore the lineage between the Nautilus and the U-Boat.

Nevertheless, 1916's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is still a worthy first entry into adaptations of this classic tale. All adaptations since 1954 have languished in the long shadow cast by that Nautilus, but this early piece of silent film history has emerged to provide an alternative glimpse on the life and times of Captain Nemo.

The full 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea silent film.

Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Due in no small part to the Disney film adaptation, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has emerged as the pre-eminent classic of Victorian Scientific Romances. Verne alone published 54 Scientific Romances during his lifetime, bearing the brand label "Voyages Extraordinaires." The term was invented by Verne's publisher, Jules Hetzel, to describe a brand new genre of literature designed "to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format...the history of the universe." Twenty Thousand Leagues is, arguably, the greatest of them all.

Illustration of Captain Nemo based on Jules Verne,
by Alphonse de Neuville.

As some critics have observed, based primarily on shoddy English translations, Twenty Thousand Leagues is for the most part a novel about fish. Though an inventive extrapolation on existing submersible technology, the Nautilus is for the most part a plot device by which Verne takes his readers on an unparalleled oceanographic expedition through each of the seven seas. Over its 200-some pages, Captain Nemo is a tourguide through oceans, beneath icecaps, past famous shipwrecks, and beyond Atlantis. But Verne was also an insightful critic of society as well as a literary inventor of technological contraptions. There is more to Twenty Thousand Leagues than fish, or submarines.

Peering out of the salon window,
by Alphonse de Neuville.

Film versions have tended towards the character drama of the Nautilus' captives - French Professor Aronnax, his assistant Conseil and French-Canadian harpooner Ned Land - though their attempts to escape their maritime prison were a minimal aspect of the novel. Twenty Thousand Leagues is not really about them. Rather, they are the lens through which we are invited to, first, see the world beneath the ocean surface and, second, to see into the life of the mysterious Captain Nemo.

The fiery fate of Atlantis, by Alphonse de Neuville.

Though much has been made of Disney's Nemo as the tortured political refugee seeking revenge against and refuge from the rulers of the surface world, this cinematic version is actually the crudest caricature of Verne's mariner. While he has the airs of waging war on war - and it might prompt a post-9/11 society to ask if you can wage wars on tactics like war and terrorism - his is really a much simpler story of revenge. Verne's character is more complicated and politically charged, to the point that the published version was actually censored from the original manuscript. The author's intention was to make Nemo a Polish refugee escaped from tsarist Russia, but Hetzel felt it would alienate the Russian audience. Eventually, in the sequel novel The Mysterious Island, Nemo was revealed as an Indian prince escaped from British India.

Preparing for battle, by Alphonse de Neuville.

Verne is still more ambiguous about Nemo than even simple anti-colonial interpretations permit. Nemo reflects one of the fundamental anxieties of post-colonial Western society, which wishes to redress the endless ream of crimes that made possible its existence and economic prosperity while simultaneously refusing to leave that advantage behind. On the one hand he is the avenger of the poor and oppressed, but on the other he is a colonialist par excellence.

Though professing a desire to escape the world above, he does so only in terms that allow him to take the fruits of that land with him. He fishes the sea for food, but trawls the land for treasures of books, paintings and other things that occupy his salon and library. His library, Aronnax estimates, contains some six or seven thousand volumes, which Nemo corrects at 12,000 with the addendum "These are the only ties which bind me to the earth." Not quite, as amongst the artistic treasures in Nemo's salon are,

...a Madonna of Raphael, a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph of Correggio, a woman of Titian, and Adoration of Veronese, an Assumption of Murillo, a portrait of Holbein, a monk of Velasquez, a martyr of Ribeira, a fair of Rubens, two Flemish landscapes of Teniers, three little "genre" pictures of Gérard Dow, Metsu, and Paul Potter, two specimens of Géricault and Prudhon, and some sea-pieces of Backhuysen and Vernet... Delacroix, Ingres, Decamp, Troyon, Meissonnier, Daubigny...

Add to this the composers whose works rest upon the organ - Weber, Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Hérold, Wagner, Auber, Gounod - and what we have is a cultured man of means possessing refined tastes. Feebly he objects that these "Masters have no age" and that "in the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced," invoking the timeless objective value of artistic excellence against the direct social, cultural, economic and chronological processes that permit artistic excellence.

The salon, by Édouard Riou.

The Nautilus which houses such treasures is not the unique product of a lone inventor's sweat and elbow-grease, but is itself very much the product of colonial industry. Nemo reveals his process:

Each separate portion... was brought from different parts of the globe. The keel was forged at Crensot, the shaft of the screw at Penn & Co.'s, London, the iron plates of the hull at Laird's of Liverpool, the screw itself at Scott's at Glasgow. The reservoirs were made by Cail & Co. at Paris, the engine by Krupp in Prussia, its beak in Motala's workshop in Sweden, its mathematical instruments by Hart Brothers, of New York, etc...

The most physical labour was in the jigsaw piecing together of the craft on a desert island. The final tally of Nemo's privileged escape from the terrors of the surface world? "It came therefore to £67,000, and £80,000 more for fitting it up, and about £200,000 with the works of art and the collections it contains." Keep in mind that he is speaking here of the investment capital, prior to having been able to access the riches of the ocean depths. In his life on land, Nemo was obviously a man of considerable wealth and education by anyone's standard. "Immensely rich, sir;" he tells Aronnax, "and I could, without missing it, pay the national debt of France."

The Nautilus, by Alphonse de Neuville.

The land is still required for the operation of the Nautilus' engines. Unlike the Disney film, which ties the electrical power of the ship to atomic power, Verne's device was a sodium extraction method that requires coal in the production of the sodium. The coal, Nemo proudly states, comes from beds beneath the ocean. The burning of the coal for the sodium needs must occur on land, in the shelter provided by the exhausted crater of an extinct volcano in the Atlantic.

Nowhere are Nemo's ties to the land more obvious than when he literally plants his flag and his name over a whole continent. Later on in the novel, without any hint of the irony or hypocrisy, Nemo plants the black flag embroidered with a golden "N" on the snow and gravel of Antarctica and proclaims,

I, Captain Nemo, on this 21st day of March, 1868, have reached the south pole on the ninetieth degree; and I take possession of this part of the globe, equal to one sixth of the known continents.

When asked by Aronnax in whose name he lays this claim, Nemo brusquely replies "In my own, sir!" Finally as the sun slips out of sight on its half-year retreat, he bids it farewell:

Adieu, sun! Disappear, thou radiant orb! Rest beneath this open sea, and let a night of six months spread its shadows over my new domains!

Gone are any pretences of escaping the land or its systems of colonialism and domination. Nemo becomes the sole monarch of the Antarctic, and happily so.

Nemo surveys his new empire, by Alphonse de Neuville.

But for the most part, Nemo's chosen domain of colonial exploitation is the ocean, which serves as his personal political territory, larder and bank. On the one hand he speaks of the liberty of the depths, but on the other hand speaks of his ownership of them:

... the sea supplies all my wants. Sometimes I cast my nets in tow, and I draw them in ready to break. Sometimes I hunt in the midst of this element, which appears to be inaccessible to man, and quarry the game which dwells in my submarine forests. My flocks, like those of Neptune's old shepherds, graze fearlessly in the immense prairies of the ocean. I have a vast property there, which I cultivate myself, and which is always sown by the hand of the Creator of all things.

A hunting excursion, by Alphonse de Neuville.

The society he creates aboard his ship, which makes for the efficient exploitation of the fruits de mer, is a definite mirror of the hierarchies above the waves. The library and salon are Nemo's alone, granted to the three captives, but with no indication that they are at the service of the Nautilus' mostly silent crew. This crew is a nameless presence that exists to serve the needs of the protagonists. Like the Disney film, this has a practical narrative purpose of not bogging the story down with additional characters, with the unfortunate side-effect of creating a deeply classist society aboard the ship. A later Verne film - Master of the World starring Vincent Price and written by Richard Matheson - does give personality to the crew, to much better effect in explaining their loyalty to the mission and their captain.

Repeatedly Nemo demonstrates compassion for the oppressed and impoverished. He reveals his ethnicity only briefly by identifying with an East Indian pearl diver he rescues from the clutches of a shark attack (likely because this is as close as Verne got to figuring out who Nemo was going to be by publication time, if he could not be Polish). He is again shown sending gold ingots up to another fisherman, as well as demonstrating the source of this wealth. Upon seeing the shipwrecks that supply Nemo with his millions in net worth, Aronnax remarks that he pities "the thousands of unfortunates to whom so much riches well distributed would have been profitable, whilst for them they will be forever barren." Nemo angrily retorts,

Do you think then, sir, that these riches are lost because I gather them? Is it for myself alone, according to your idea, that I take the trouble to collect these treasures? Who told you that I did not make a good use of it? Do you think I am ignorant that there are suffering beings and oppressed races on this earth, miserable creatures to console, victims to avenge? Do you not understand?

Saving the pearl diver, by Édouard Riou.

He hands charity to these suffering masses, and certainly claims solidarity, but the question must be raised as to the exact extent of the solidarity. What does this solidarity even mean when one has fled from the life conditions of the suffering into a perpetual escape of relative ease and luxury? Nemo's life is not one of real involvement in the struggle of others as one among them, or attempting to use a position of wealth and authority to affect systemic change to benefit the poor. As Aronnax observes, "I understand the life of this man; he has made a world apart for himself, in which he treasures all his greatest wonders."

Nemo is very much the embodiment of the modern, or post-modern, age. It is acutely aware of the processes of colonial exploitation of people and the environment, but at the same time still insistent on benefiting from those processes. It dispenses charity in the name of solidarity while setting a world apart for itself (which, granted, is still better than doing nothing or, even worse, claiming solidarity while doing nothing). In the end, Nemo is prohibited from reconciling this ambiguity to himself, as the symbolic Maelstrom sends a crazed spectre of himself and his ship to the bottom of the seas, from whence it will emerge in The Mysterious Island.

Aronnax and co. escape during the Maelstrom,
by Alphonse de Neuville.

The Scientific Romances of Coney Island

When it comes to the amusement park... the classic fairyland of boardwalks, sideshows and rickety old wooden rides... there is no greater an icon than New York's immortal Coney Island.

For the residents of New York living in the Gay Nineties, Brooklyn's spit of beachfront property along the Hudson River was shangri-la. It first drew attention in the wake of the American Civil War, with beaches, clam beds, and horse racing. The first carousel was installed in Vandeveer's bath-house in 1876, with meticulously hand-carved horses. Nathan's Famous invented the hot dog there in 1916. A bustling avenue called The Bowery led to the beach and later amusement parks, but also tempted the visitor with sights, sounds and lights, rides and sideshows, gambling, fortune tellers and dance halls.

This was followed by the island's three historic amusement parks: Luna Park, Steeplechase Park and Dreamland.

Steeplechase Park was built in 1897 and was renowned for its Ferris Wheel and the steeplechase mechanical horse racetrack ride that surrounded the glass and steel Palace of Fun indoor park. In 1940, the Steeplechase acquired the Parachute Jump from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, where it has remained despite the 1964 closure and demolition of the park. The inoperable Jump is affectionately nicknamed "Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower".

One of the great headline attractions at Steeplechase had been A Trip to the Moon. The ride had been the creation of partners Frederick Thompson and Skip Dundy, was based more or less on the film of the same name by Georges Méliès, and had originally debuted at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York. Visitors entered the "station" to see a huge craft with bat-like wings, dubbed "Luna." Once 30 passengers had been strapped in, the wings began to beat and Luna lifted off. First the exposition, then the city, then the earth sped away behind the celestial craft. Eventually they descended through the clouds to the surface of the moon, where they were greeted by dwarven Selenites. These Selenites conducted visitors through the moon's underground passages to an audience with the Man in the Moon and an musical fountain show. Finally they were given pieces of lunar cheese and disgorged back into the park.

A postcard promoting A Trip to the Moon.

How was this possible? A cyclorama, or panorama, was a popular merging of public entertainment and the arts in the late 19th century. These were cylindrical paintings that were meant to imitate a full panoramic field of vision. Sometimes, in order to heighten the effect, foreground items were added that turned the cyclorama into a full diorama in the round. Each successive leg of the flight - the exposition, the city, and the earth - were painted canvas scrolls. 

Steeplechase Park's owner was very impressed by this attraction and leased it from Thompson and Dundy in 1902. At the park, A Trip to the Moon drew over 850,000 guests during one of the rainiest summers on record. Steeplechase ended up being the only existing park at Coney Island to turn a profit that year. But when it came time to renegotiate the lease, the owner decided to lower the cut to Thompson and Dundy, prompting them to take their ride and go home.

Luna Park was perhaps the most magnificent of the three parks. Originally Captain Paul Boyton's Sea Lion Park, it was purchased by Thompson and Dundy as competition against Steeplechase Park. They rechristened it Luna Park in 1903, after the airship. A motto on the gate described Luna as "The Heart of Coney Island", and that it was.

Entering the park, the visitor was swept down a surreal promenade with a replica of Venice complete gondoliers. To the right, the first attraction visitors came upon was A Trip to the Moon.  next came eir new cyclorama show and the very first attraction ostensibly based on Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. 

The thoroughfare of Luna Park, with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to the right.

Walking down the main thoroughfare, revelers were herded into 20,000 Leagues by a barker clad in Eskimo furs. Like later attractions, visitors descended into the bowels of the submersible craft where, outside the portholes, a bizarre array of wonders revealed themselves. Amongst the scenes cycling by in this trip from the Indian to the Arctic Ocean were fish, coral reefs, sunken ships, wisps of seaweed, tentacled octopus, and even a mermaid.

After this cyclorama of ocean life, the submarine surfaced in the frigid wastes of the Arctic... That is, into a refrigerated warehouse where real icebergs floated about the expansive pool, providing rest to a menagerie of living polar bears and seals. It was also home to a tribe of Inuit (or actors in Inuit garb), complete with igloos and dogsleds. An Aurora Borealis effect was projected on the sky-like ceiling.

A postcard promoting Luna Park's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The cost this magnificent attraction in 1903 was $180,000 (or about $4.1 million in today's dollar). Rides were 25 cents apiece. Unfortunately, it was replaced a mere two years later by the Dragon's Gorge scenic roller coaster, which sent visitors on a trip through the Grand Canyon, North Pole, Africa and Hades.

Fir trees and flags lined this avenue to fairyland, welcoming the harried masses to a timeless escape. The main attraction was the Shoot the Chutes, but visitors also enjoyed the Helter Skelter slide, the circus, and the War of the Worlds miniature naval show (not based on the Wells novel). At the centre of Luna was the Electric Tower and a crystal lagoon, which lit up at night with 250,000 electric lights. Maxim Gorky wrote, in 1907:

With the advent of night a fantastic city all of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky. Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine sensitive outline on the black background of the sky, shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces and temples. Golden gossamer threads tremble in the air. They intertwine in transparent, flaming patterns, which flutter and melt away in love with their own beauty mirrored in the waters. Fabulous beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation.

A postcard illustrating Luna Park's evening electric light display.

Eventually the park fell on harder times. The park suffered a fire in 1944 and closed forever in 1945.

Of these past amusement palaces, the story of Dreamland is perhaps the most tragic. This was a Coney Island epic... Built in 1904 as direct competition to Luna Park, Dreamland possessed an almost World's Fair-like atmosphere. Stunning Art Deco buildings overlooked a lagoon and housed miniature Swiss railways and Venetian canals, a Japanese tearoom, an airship exhibit, dance hall, copycat submarine attraction, and a shoot-the-chutes. There was also the Bostock Circus, featuring liontamer Captain Bonavita. At night, the complex, central tower and lagoon - like Luna Park's - were lit up in a million electric lights.

Sadly, an accidental fire in May of 1911 grew unchecked until it engulfed all of Dreamland. The entire facility was reduced to charred cinders, and never rebuilt. Today, the New York aquarium occupies the same plot of land.

Vestiges of Coney Island's playful past still exist. The Cyclone roller coaster was built in 1927, replacing the earlier Giant Coaster. One of the largest remaining wooden roller coasters, its incredible intensity still thrills riders today. The massive Wonder Wheel ferris wheel, completed in 1920, features both stationary and moving cars along its circumference, and is both a designated historic resource and centrepiece of the family-owned, family-oriented Deno's Wonder Wheel Park. In the tradition of Coney Island's long history of sideshows, there is also the Sideshows by the Seashore arts collective and a museum chronicling the past of this remarkable place of enchantment.

King's Views of New York

Born in London, England, in 1853, Moses King developed a publishing empire that produced guidebooks of cities across the UK and United States. His guidebooks did more than show these cities as they were: he also discussed their histories and projected into their futures. These images were especially popular as cover pieces, and featured on the 1908, 1911, and 1915 volumes.

The 1911/15 cover proved so popular that it was released as a full-colour postcard of its own. On the back of the postcard was a description of the scene.

Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all and rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high. 

A New Way of Travelling

In this hand-tinted 1908 Pathé Frères short by Segundo de Chomón, a trio of slapstick Chinese explorers (interpreted through very 1908 caricatures) figure out a new way to venture into the depths of the ocean. Once they dash themselves on the rocks of the seabed, the oddities of the submarine realm reveal themselves in a very Mélièsian cavalcade of cinema trickery.

Stalled!

Arthur T. Merrick provides this charming image from the Dec. 2nd, 1899 issue of Life Magazine. Merry Christmas to all, and I hope Santa makes it on time!

The Rankin/Bass Holiday Special Cinematic Universe

Since the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a billion dollar franchise, there have been many attempts at replicating its success with every available intellectual property lying around. Marvel did not invent the concept of an interlinked series of films and television shows, however. Between 1923 and 1959, Universal Studios produced 72 horror films that eventually wove together in the ongoing battles between Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Frankenstein Monster. Toho Studios in the 50's, 60's, and 70's eventually linked all of their giant monster movies together into a single "Showa Era" continuity headlined by Godzilla. Another studio to try their hand was Rankin/Bass, who produced the preeminent series of holiday specials beginning with 1964's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  

Richard Vincent Culter's "The Gay Nineties"

The actual 1890's were not especially gay for the United States. The Panic of 1893, caused by a contraction in foreign commodities trade and subsequent run on US banks to exchange dollars for gold, lead to an economic depression through much of the decade. Stock prices declined, over 500 banks closed, 15,000 businesses did the same, followed by farms and numerous railroads including Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Unemployment was as high as 40% in some areas and foreclosed mortgages were a common thing, creating the enduring image of the boarded up, abandoned Victorian mansion. Strikes among the industrial workforce were also increasingly common and the decade ended with the Spanish-American War and the Klondike Gold Rush.  

Yet it was also the decade of the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition and significant technological advancements. Electricity replaced gas lighting, the automobile became more common and more affordable, Ragtime and Vaudeville grew in popularity, and film became a thing. When the children of the 1890's came of age in the post-World War One milieu, they looked back with nostalgia on their younger years (as each generation is given to).

Then along came Richard Vincent Cutler, who began a series of nostalgic cartoons in Charles Dana Gibson's Life Magazine in 1925. In 1927, the cartoons were collected in a single volume titled The Gay Nineties, An Album of Reminiscent Drawings. Cutler is largely credited with having originated the term "Gay Nineties" as a label not for the decade itself but for that fond, nostalgic reminiscence for it. The following are a selection of The Gay Nineties cartoons from the pages of Life. Click on each image for a larger, more legible, version. 

The Haunted House by Segundo de Chomón

The Haunted House is a delightful little trick film by Spanish pioneer of effects films, Segundo de Chomón. Coming out the same year as his better-known The Electric Hotel, here de Chomón reverts to full-on fantasy without the scientific glosses, placing his characters inside a truly haunted house.

The Tables Turned by E.E. Kellett

It can be a hard afterlife out there for a ghost. A proper appointment to a lucrative position can be difficult to come by, especially in a skeptical age. That is where the narrator of our story The Tables Turned comes in. His job is placing ghosts with needful clients... Though it isn't without its challenges. One customer can't seem to keep his house haunted, and the reasons why become apparent with the tragedy of the most recent applicant to the position.

Written by E.E. Kellett, The Tables Turned appeared in the January 1903 edition of Pearson's Magazine. Click on the page for a larger version.

Life Magazine's "In 1950"

The Spanish-American War was short-lived, lasting from April to August of 1898 and ending with the Treaty of Paris in which Spain's Pacific holdings were transferred to the United States' growing sphere of oceanic influence. This included the Philippines, which naturally didn't sit well with Filipinos. The very next year, a guerilla war began that lasted longer than the actual Spanish-American War. The Philippine-American War lasted from 1899 to 1902 and claimed the lives of at least 200,000 Filipino civilians with high estimates up to a million. Among Filipinos, this was considered simply the next stage of the Philippine Revolution against the Spanish that began in 1896. Unfortunately it ended in a loss for the freedom fighters and, in a sense, for the esteem of the United States.   

This war was not without its critics at home. Chief among them was the original Life Magazine. Starting publication in 1883 and lasted to 1935 as an illustration-heavy magazine of light humour and social commentary. The magazine's style, carried over from the "Gay Nineties," was not well received in the post-Great War milieu and it was bought out by publisher Henry Luce in 1936. Luce transformed Life into the all-photographic newsmagazine with which latter generations are more familiar. 

The following illustration, by C.H. Ebert, comes from the July 26, 1900 issue of Life. Titled "In 1950," it is a retro-futurist commentary on the protracted nature of the Philippine guerilla war:

Strange Ships that Sail in the Skies

The following article ran down the wire of several newspapers on Sunday, May 9, 1897, including the Saint Paul Globe, Buffalo Times, and the Sunday News of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In it, many a prognostication is made of what ways in which man might take to the air. Suffice it to say that few such ideas took hold. 

Click on the image, and right click again, for a larger, more readable version.

And here are some close-ups of the various flying machines (including one that worked its way into the weblog logo!).

Gaston Velle's A Little Jules Verne

French silent film pioneer and rival to Georges Méliès, Gaston Velle went direct to source with a loving tribute to Jules Verne. Released in 1907, Un Petit Jules Verne has a boy reading from the great author before bed. Drifting off to sleep, images of Verne, a comet, and other fantasmagoria appear in his dreams. One such marvel - a flying machine - parks itself long enough for the boy climb in a whisked off on his own adventure.

St. Louis in 2010

The following vision of  "Looking Up Olive Street, St. Louis, Missouri, in the Year 2010" comes from a 1910 issue of the Greater St. Louis Magazine. Click for a larger image.

The Grand Canyon's Lost Civilization

It began with a modest announcement in the March 12, 1909 edition of the Arizona Gazette announcing "G.E. KINCAID REACHES YUMA". The brief article stated that "G.E. Kincaid of Lewiston, Idaho, arrived in Yuma after a trip from Green River, Wyoming, down the entire course of the Colorado River. He is the second man to make this journey and came alone in a small skiff, stopping at his pleasure to investigate the surrounding country. He left Green River in October having a small covered boat with oars, and carrying a fine camera, with which he secured over 700 views of the river and canyons which were unsurpassed. Mr. Kincaid says one of the most interesting features of the trip was passing through the sluiceways at Laguna dam. He made this perilous passage with only the loss of an oar." It concluded with "Some interesting archaeological discoveries were unearthed and altogether the trip was of such interest that he will repeat it next winter in the company of friends."

A circa 1900 photo of the Grand Canyon's interior.

What  archaeological discoveries were these? The following month, April 5, the Arizona Gazette furnished a much more complete report of an absolutely astonishing discovery:

EXPLORATIONS IN GRAND CANYON

Mysteries of Immense High Cavern Being Brought to Light

JORDAN IS ENTHUSED

Remarkable Finds Indicate Ancient People Migrated From Orient 

 

Im Jahre 2000 mit Stollwerck Chocolade

Retro-futuristic cards were a popular inclusion for chocolates in Europe. The following set was produced by Stollwerck Chocolade, a German chocolatier founded in 1839. Of course, for as popular as retro-futuristic topics were, they were a drop in the bucket of the overall production of these advertising collectables. Stollwerck produced some 5,000 different six-card sets.  

The entire set could be collected into a framed matte with additional poetry. The following is an example of a set and a few close-ups.

John Hale's Flying Machine by Anna Leach

"Where's my flying car?"

That is the cry of the disappointed futurist who bemoans that our most ambitious dreams have yet to reach fruition... No flying cars, no robot maids, no lunar colonies, alas. We must only make due with high-speed internet, 4K digital displays, personal computer/telecommunication devices kept in our pockets, instantaneous news and messaging, robot vacuums, and other dreary modern conveniences.

In reality, what we need is not always the same as what we want. And more often than not, what we need isn't even apparent to us until someone invents it. And occasionally, those aren't even the things the inventor set out to invent.  

Anna Leach explores this topic in her comic short story John Hale's Flying Machine. Published in the 1894-95 volume of The Argosy magazine, her literary misdirection explores the idea of accidental invention through that classic trope of the Gay Nineties: boys down by the ol' fishin' hole...

Click on each page for a larger version.

Walter R. Booth's The Over-Incubated Baby

As we all know, infancy is a child's most grotesque stage of development. So much neediness and squalling and fluids. If only there was some way to accelerate the growth process and skip that whole baby stage entirely. But if such technology existed, it would have be to be used carefully. An accident, like that outlined in Walter R. Booth's 1901 trick film The Over-Incubated Baby, would be disastrous. 

Life Magazine's Glimpses into the Future

I wonder if the relative degree of optimism in futuristic visions can be determined by how far away they are placed. For example, Walt Disney, ever the optimist, set his Tomorrowland in the amazing year 1986... A mere 31 years after Disneyland opened in 1955. Most Victorian-Edwardian retro-futurism seems to have opted for a safer 100 years hence. Occasionally they made those same lapses of placing the future too close to the present that make us really chuckle today. The following "Glimpses into the Future" ran through Life Magazine during 1898 and 1899, and projected into such distant times as 1901, 1912, 1930, and 1976. They do include some more objectionable fears to modern multicultural sensibilities, and aren't especially optimistic, but also hold out perennial dreams like the flying car. Click on each image for a larger version. 

The Tricycle of the Future by Frank R. Stockton

Though little discussed today, save perhaps for one of his most famous fairy tales, Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902) was often compared to his contemporary Mark Twain as a humourist and writer of children's fiction. That most famous work is the ambiguous fairy tale The Lady, or the Tiger? published in The Century Magazine in 1882. In it, the lover of a princess is sentenced by the king to choose between two doors. Behind one is a tiger that will rip him asunder, behind the other is one of the princess' handmaidens whom he would marry. The princess furtively directs him to one of the doors... but the story ends before revealing which one. 

Prior to The Lady, or the Tiger?, Stockton served as assistant editor on St. Nicholas Magazine, one of the higher caliber magazines for children available in the later half of the 19th century. There he sharpened his wit in writing not only fairy tales, but also Scientific Romances. He would go on to write for St. Nicholas' parent-magazine The Century and Harper's, eventually producing full novels. Most notable of these is The Great War Syndicate (1889) about a future war between the United States and Great Britain. 

The Tricycle of the Future is a delightful short story that exemplifies one of the great joys of Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances: how writers of the 19th century arrived at modern technologies through the most abstract, complicated, and absurd ways. In this case, Stockton's boy inventor comes up with the idea for what is essentially an automobile with a six-horsepower engine using six actual horses. But as typical for boy inventors from Darius Green on down, it doesn't quite work out as anticipated.

The following is the complete Tricycle of the Future as it appeared in the May 1885 volume of St. Nicholas Magazine. Click on each page for a larger version.