Also, the Teleharmonium, from 1907.[1] This was actually built. Startups with too much venture capital are not a new thing.
The Teleharmonium was the first musical synthesizer. The approach was to have one tone generator for each note, and switchgear run from a keyboard. That's a reasonable idea, and electric organs of the 1950s to 1970s worked that way.
But this was before amplifiers. They wanted to distribute the music over telephone wires to speakers in hotels, and needed power. So each tone generator was a sizable electrical generator. The whole installation was building-sized.
I find it interesting the equivalence they make between the future's conquest of air and sea. Most of the air infrastructure listed exists today if you squint hard enough, particularly with the recent advent of increasingly ubiquitous drones. The conquest of the deep however hasn't extended much past diving suits and exploration, with the possible exception of oil extraction.
"Who here is down to start seahorse racing?" is basically what I'm asking, lol.
A testament to how little we can see beyond the existing frontier of scientific and technological development. The slides depicting the mechanisation of work, chores and music are accurate enough, but automation has been a continuous trend elapsing over several hundred years - they simply extrapolated forward that which was already abundantly evident. But the futuristic automation of the future envisioned here is, of course, just the automation of nineteenth century technologies.
Also, what's up with the pictures of humans riding sea creatures?!
> Also, what's up with the pictures of humans riding sea creatures?!
Probably had a lot to do with 20000 leagues under the sea.
I was actually surprised at how much flying was depicted. While blimps were a thing, the idea of an aircraft as pictured wasn't something that existed (AFAIK). You can see some of that with the fact that everyone just had wings and nothing else. However, there were a few propeller airplanes in the mix which somewhat surprised me.
The other part I find fascinating is what they thought you COULD easily automate with mechanical means (like a barber, lol!)
Some of it they hit right on the mark (like farming) others were way off on how easily they'd be automated.
I also thought the automated band was simply funny. I'm sure we could do it today, but why? We'd rather digitally record and replay that 10000 times.
Making music cheaper and more widely available at events was a big area of enterprise and innovation around the turn of the last century.
I think the "automated band" refers to musical automation like player pianos and fairground organs. Today, you might still find them in vintage carousels.
Another direction in making music cheaper was electric organs, such as the Hammond organ. In the first half of the 20th century, tens of thousands of American churches bought a Hammond organ as a cheaper alternative to bellows-driven organs.
Here's a entertaining and popular video of a guy playing the bells and whistles on a fairground organ.[1]
A reason to have a band or orchestra versus recordings played over speakers is that there is a noticeable difference (though this also depends on the space being used) in sound. A recording is not the same as a live performance (whether by humans or robots).
> Some of it they hit right on the mark (like farming) others were way off on how easily they'd be automated.
I feel like many people here on HN are in the same spots. While ML has worked for few fields, there are some ML enthusiasts that believe most jobs, even creative ones will be automated within 10-20 years, which I find unlikely.
I went to a museum in the Netherlands full of various automated band builds, and some of them were incredible (also huge), but definitely a massive difference between hearing it live vs recording. I couldn't imagine what seeing of one these in the streets would be like back in the day.
Weren't player pianos (and nickelodeons) a thing back then? Plus, if you've ever visited "House on the Rock" in Wisconsin the mechanical orchestras are pretty neat to watch.
> the futuristic automation of the future envisioned here is, of course, just the automation of nineteenth century technologies
This is how I feel when people prophesize about super-intelligent AI. Sure, it could happen, and it could revolutionize society, but maybe we're just extrapolating outside the limits of what is feasible. Maybe the idea will seem quaint in 100 years when IT is a boring field and futurists have much more interesting fodder to work with.
People get predictions wrong because they usually just extend ideas and concerns from their present lives into the future. It's understandable, and to some extent I think you can't get around doing that, except by randomly guessing and occasionally getting things right. I think about that picture of the winged mailman whenever futurists prognosticate about how we'll live in 20 years, let alone 100.
What I find noticeable is how it misses automotive infrastructure entirely, and instead focuses on aeroplanes. Some cars are depicted, but roads in the rural depictions are still dirt roads, not anticipating they would be paved. Paved roads did exist before the 1890s, as they were generally used for cyclists.
With the Panhard brothers arranging the Paris to Lyon race in the 1890s, you'd think the artist would have heard of this, and anticipated more cars. Notice the background of the cities, there are almost no cars on the streets.
Here's the cover picture for the set, which few sources have.[2]
There's much similar material from 1900-1925. Some of which even worked.[3]
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:France_in_XXI_Ce...
[2] https://www.le-livre.fr/photos/R15/R150145246.jpg
[3] http://120years.net/the-staccatonehugo-gernsbakgermany1923/