We humans are always imagining how fantastic or dystopic our future is going to be. I remember watching The Jetsons as a kid and thinking about how amazing it would be to fly in the family car, talk on a video phone, and have a robot to clean my room for me. When I watched Flight of the Navigator at Expo ’86, I was convinced that I would stumble across an alien ship in the woods one day. Only one of those things has actually happened; although the alien thing is still a possibility, and roombas exist, and I think Honda is working on a clunky-looking flying car (electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL)) that our descendants will probably laugh their asses off at. When you look at how we contextualize our future inventions in the aesthetics of our present, it reveals how unimaginative we actually are. Below check out some of the surprisingly accurate but also hilariously dated future technology predictions from the early and mid 1900s.
Images via History Collection
Japan predicted Japan 
In 1914, Life Magazine thought 1950’s people would dress like this 
1979 imagined the 2020 Olympics 
1940’s prediction of the Home Shopping Network 
Popular Science, 1955 
1936 propeller train from Japan 
There were multiple pieces of concept art created of these Man Amplifiers, and the Cornell Lab worked on it from 1962 to 1966. 
Vacations on the Moon 
NASA’s 1970’s future space colony 
NASA’s 1970’s future space colony 
Nasa’s 1989 VR headset called the Ames Virtual Environment Workstation 
1979 personal pods by Syd Mead 
1963 pocket phone 
A retro concept product of a portable TV, 1967 
1900 predictions about the year 2000 
Farming in the 21st century, 1958 
Phone of the future 
The Sega VR headset from the 1990s 
21st Century Space Explorers by Klaus Bürgle, 1965 
In 1967, Conrad Hilton announced tot he Wall Street Journal that he plans to create a space hotel on the moon. 
An artist’s concept of a vacation resort on the moon, 1960s 
Tomorrowland in 1960 
This image shows an inventor named Hugo Gernsback demonstrating his television goggles, also known as “teleyeglasses” in 1963 for Life Magazine. 
1958 illustration of a 21st century flying car 
Food truck of the future, 1950s 
1960s ViewFinder GPS 
1934 Television Newspaper 
Mid-century idea of what we’d do in a self-driving car 
1900 predictions about the year 2000 
An issue of Popular Mechanics from 1915
