One Hundred Years Hence

The following samples of merchandise premium cards is an English-language version of the same art used for the set by Hildebrands Chocolate that we previously posted about. Makers of these cards - in this case likely Kuntsdruck-Friedberg of Berlin - would happily replicate art and designs for companies in different markets. Why mess up a good thing? At the turn of the century, it was highly unlikely that someone buying chocolates in some remote city in the US or UK would have previously seen the same set in chocolates from Germany, and even less of a chance that they would really care all that much.

 

Six Weeks in the Moon; or, A Trip Beyond the Zenith

Happy Days was a magazine that ran from 1894 to 1924 and published stories very much in the classic "dime novel" vein. The overwhelming number of its stories are of the "boy" type... The pages of Happy Days were replete with boy detectives, boy sheriffs, boy lawyers, boy financiers, boy industrialists, boy rangers, boy miners, boy adventurers, boys going to every corner of the world, boys running off to the circus, and boys before the sail. Rarely, the occasional scientific romance also graced it pages. 

Six Weeks in the Moon; or, A Trip Beyond the Zenith ran in Happy Days from issues 68 to 75, volume III, February 1 through March 21 of 1896. Unfortunately, issues 70, 72, and 73 are lost, cutting out several chapters of the story. What does exist is presented here. Click on the image for a larger version, right click for even bigger.

Moscow in the XXIII Century

William Gibson once described Science Fiction not as true speculation about the future, but rather, the colonization of the future with the present. A dramatic example of this truism can be found in the postcard series Moscow in the XXIII Century, produced in 1914.  

Published by Einem, one of the biggest and most popular confectionary brands in Russia, these cards purported to show the grand Russian capital as it would become between 2114 and 2259... The same mixed image of metropolitan futurism with the social and aesthetic conventions of the day seen in the French En L'An 2000 card series. Unfortunately, Einem could not predict that a scant three years after production of these cards, the blight of Communism would seize Russia, murdering tens of millions and dashing any such hopes as these. Whereas En L'An 2000 has a wistful air, Moscow in the XXIII Century has a tragic one. 

Eight cards were produced in the series, collected here...

Lubianka.

The Conversion of the Professor by George Chetwyn Griffith

Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered. People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust. People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue. The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating. The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man. Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant. This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science. If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well — that is to say, all very well for everybody except them. But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique. If a biologist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well. The truth is that the biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set of his time.

This quote by the Edwardian Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton nicely articulates the central problem in George Chetwyn Griffith's The Conversion of the Professor: A Tale of the Fourth Dimension. Published in the May 1899 edition of Pearson's Magazine, the author of A Honeymoon in Space and The Angel of the Revolution introduces us to a British high society melodrama. Poor Miss Idris Lincoln, B.Sc. wishes to marry Mr. Frederick Herne, a solid, good, and faithful man though not of Miss Lincoln's intellectual caste. Standing between them is her father Professor Lincoln, who is taken with near-religious fervor for eugenic ideas. Humane entreaties of romantic passion hold no sway over the man of genius who adheres to the laws of natural selection as he understands them.

When not occupied with family drama, the esteemed professor's attentions are consumed by calculations which may open up to him the mysteries of the Fourth Dimension, that great unknown beyond our three dimensions. These explorations are oddly mystical... They are opened up not by a machine of some devising, but through symbols and sigils and equations. But by whatever means he achieves the Fourth Dimension, what he learns there will transform his life and the lives of everyone around him.

The full text of The Conversion of the Professor follows, as it was published in Pearson's Magazine. Click on each page for a larger version.    

Arthur Thiele's Flugmaschinen

Carl Robert Arthur Thiele was a well-known illustrator of postcards within Germany, though his output outside the country is not as well known. Beyond Deutschland he was mostly known as a painter of anthropomorphic animals, and they were his most profitable subject. Nevertheless he produced many, many images of many different kinds. Born in Leipzig in 1860 and dying in the same city in 1936, he lived through both the fantasies of air travel and its realization. Among his prodigious postcard paintings are a few series of the life aeronautic. Even these are but a small sample of his postcards on this one subject.  

Receiving drinks and hors d'oeuvres aboard the party barge.

The caption speaks to the pleasure and strengthening of the heart

that comes from a flight through the Italian sunshine. 

Collision with a messenger boy.

Aerial rabbit hunting.

En L'An 2000 - Daily Life Made Better

En L'An 2000 (English: In the Year 2000) were a series of cigarette cards produced in France at the turn of 1900. The initial series was released between 1899 and 1901, in conjunction with the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, when excitement about the advancements of the coming century were accelerating. A second series was produced in 1910.

In this third collection, we look at how daily life was predicted to improve in the year 2000... Hearths heated by radium, education by osmosis, new methods of agriculture, advances in science, chemical dinners, and correspondence via cinema-phono-telegraphique... Or what we, in more banal times, call "the Internet."

En L'An 2000 - The Life Aquatic

En L'An 2000 (English: In the Year 2000) were a series of cigarette cards produced in France at the turn of 1900. The initial series was released between 1899 and 1901, in conjunction with the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, when excitement about the advancements of the coming century were accelerating. A second series was produced in 1910.

This second set of cards from the series goes on and beneath the waves. This vision of the year 2000 not only has humankind taking to the air, but also taming the wild depths of the sea.