How French artists over a century ago imagined the year 2000
Drawings created by French artists around 1900 offer a quirky vision of the future — some images turned out surprisingly accurate, others remained pure fantasy.
More than a century has passed since French artists attempted to imagine what life would look like in the year 2000. The series of drawings was created in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910 by artist Jean-Marc Côté, working alongside several other French illustrators.
According to the Public Domain Review, the images were originally produced around the time of the 1900 Paris World's Fair and were printed on cards inserted into cigarette and cigar packets. They were later turned into postcards.
Flying machines, robots and sea creatures
Many of the artists' ideas centered on mechanical devices, flight, or a combination of both. Several of the works also depict, in rather unusual ways, humans interacting with sea creatures.
Some of the drawings are pure fantasy, while others show surprisingly accurate glimpses of the future, including agricultural machinery, helicopters, and a device resembling a forerunner of today's robotic vacuum cleaners.
Rediscovered decades later
At the time, the print run of these drawings was never widely distributed, and the images disappeared from public view for decades. That changed when American science fiction writer Isaac Asimov happened upon a miraculously preserved set of the drawings. In 1986, he published them in his book "Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000."
