Welcome to Object. I'm Farron Gibson. In researching the Imagine Futures miniseries, I've been exploring the collections on the Public Domain Review. So I am absolutely jazzed to share that this season is brought to you in partnership with the Public Domain Review. They're an online journal exploring curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas. And I'll be sharing some works from their collections over the course of this series. and you can discover images on your own related to imagined futures, forgotten pasts, and more at publicdomainreview.org. Every time we jump on a video call, we're inhabiting a futuristic fantasy. From my studio, I can see researchers thousands of miles away. Their gestures, the books on their shelves, their expressions. It's so ordinary now that we barely think about it. But actually, the very first phone call was only 150 years ago. And back then, Alexander Graham Bell was excited just to talk to someone in the next room. Professor of history Ewan Reese Morris explains that almost immediately, the Victorians started imagining more. Very, very shortly after Bell invents the telephone, people start talking about this next step that's about to be invented. They usually call it the teleptroscope, and it's going to be a telephone that allows you to see at a distance, as well as talk to people at a distance. And teleptroscopes are kind of everywhere in Victorian scientific romance. Victorian electrical engineering journals have detailed schematics, and this is how the teleptroscope is going to work. It's always on the verge of being invented, except, of course, it's not. The Victorians had different names for these fantasy devices. to lectroscopes or telephonoscopes, and they tried to picture exactly how they might work. The illustrations show something like a combination of a projected image and a telephone receiver, where you'd watch and listen at the same time. One example comes from a French advertisement for Lombard chocolate. It imagines the year 2012, showing a mother and father having a video call with their son all the way in Asia, promising to send him treats. It's funny to see how, even though they're supposedly living in the 21st century, They're dressed in 19th century clothing and surrounded by Victorian furniture. This image is quite innocent, but some of them have saucy undertones. I've noted that a number of these thinkers around the telephonoscope always seem to come up with images related to dancing girls and male viewers. That's Nancy Rose Marshall. She's a professor of 19th century art and visual culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We often have this kind of flirtatious, desirous aspect of this engagement with future technology. We often see visual technologies turned over to the idea of images that we might desire. Georges Dumouriez, also in Punch, draws a telephonoscope in 1878. And his version, likewise, has a man sitting with his wife looking at a screen from a view far away. and he's zooming in and asking his daughter to tell him more about that attractive young lady. And I'm trying to talk so your mother won't hear me sort of thing. So, yeah, I noticed there's that kind of ongoing motif, obviously part of the humor. And maybe part of a way also that some of the anxieties around these extraordinary technologies was diffused. I mean, humor is often a sign that there might be some uncertainty or discomfort in the mix. Even though the telephonoscope was never invented in the way that they imagined, it captures a real push for innovation and progress that defined the 19th century. To understand why Victorians in particular were so obsessed with the future and picturing tomorrow, we need to understand how they thought about progress itself. Up until, say, the late 18th century or so, by and large, people think about society, people think about nature for that matter as being kind of static. It's meant to be in a state of balance. Increasingly, though, in the 19th century, you get people talking about progress. Society isn't meant to stay the same. Nature doesn't stay the same. Society should progress. Nature does progress. I mean, it's no surprise from the beginning of the 19th century that you start getting people talking about evolution, becoming more public, shall we say, with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, and thinking about society as evolving and changing in the same sort of way that nature changes and evolves. Seeing science and technology as the agent of that progress increasingly, as force, the power, the means of making the future somewhere different from the present. People in the 19th century, in Britain, in America, in Europe in general, had a very strong sense that they were living at the cutting edge of progress and that everything they were experiencing was the best that had ever been. And so they had, therefore, a supreme confidence in their culture's right to act as it was acting and to continue developing in that direction. This is, however, countered by an ongoing thread of unease and uncertainty and anxiety about just that fact. Was Great Britain, for instance, on its way up in developing its empire? Or was it perhaps in its late stages of decadence and like Rome before it going to fall? There's a real sense that's expressed in multiple locations and by multiple different people of the fact that they were living in the most rapidly evolving time. It literally is the case that time and space had altered because of things like the railways that allowed people to travel more quickly from one place to another, telegraphs that allowed information to be flashed across long distances immediately. People express all the time the pressure of speed, the pressure of haste and the rapidity of change that they are experiencing. So if you're in a time of rapid change, you can see it as a time of progress, or you can also see it as an overwhelming chaos of things that have occurred that may or may not be leading towards actual future that is bright and shiny. it could in fact be something dark and dystopian. Not everyone was convinced that faster was better. Back in the 1820s and 30s, debates around what they called the March of Intellect were raging in broadsheets and magazines. Thinkers argued over the potential costs of rapid industrial and societal changes. To the optimists, it was a celebratory slogan for the mass production of books and the spread of knowledge. But skeptics saw a world where progress was literally running away with itself. In one colorful illustration by Robert Seymour, part of a series called The March of Intellect, he depicts a massive robot representing the new London University. It's now known as University College London. The robot's head is made of giant books and crowned with the university building itself. His body is constructed from printing machine parts and he wields a giant broom to sweep away laws and figures representing old ways of thinking. To some, that's a good thing, but you can see how that would be scary for others All these figures disappear into clouds helpfully labeled as dust And those labels are actually quite useful because they distinguish the clouds from steam which was a cutting technology when this print was made By the 1830s, certainly by the 1840s, this was the heyday of steam. The Rainhill Trials in 1828 had established steam as this is locomotion. There are steam locomotives running on land, there are steamboats on the oceans. J.M.W. Turner's 1839 painting, The Fighting Temeraire, poetically shows how steam technology ushered in a new era in the first half of the 19th century. The sun is setting, leaving a red-orange haze across the sky, with a sliver of moon rising on the left. A dark squat tugboat billows steam that almost appears fiery as it catches the warm tones of the sunset. It's towing the HMS Temeraire, a grand warship that had fought at the Battle of Trafalgar. The Temeraire is being dragged to its final birth to be broken up, no longer of use in this new age. It's a romantic representation of the end of an era, with the age of sail giving way to the age of steam. The painting became an icon of Britain's ambivalence about progress. Turner revisits this tension in other works as well. You can see that also, I think, in the really wonderful Rain, Steam, Speed, the painting in the National Gallery of the train rushing straight towards the viewer. out of this mist. This train is moving west out of London along the Great Western Railway Bridge that had been newly built in 1838. The picture is from 1841. And the train is rushing on its way between London and Bristol. We see the steam engine itself with the fire and the smoke belching out. But then the steam also that is being generated mingles with the natural world, the rain? So are we meant to see this as human beings harnessing natural forces in a positive way that is directing us toward the future, that is zooming out of the canvas toward us? Are we meant to see the concerns about the Frankenstein aspect of human beings exceeding their proper place and seizing powers beyond their understanding in such a way that these monsters will come back to destroy them? There is a little bunny on the track in the front of this engine and we don't know its fate. It really is a painting that is thinking about futures because we have the sense of movement of this train. It inevitably is going to, of course, overtake the bunny in some way, but will the bunny make it to safety? Will the natural world be threatened by these human machines or will we find a way to coexist? As we talk about these Victorian visions for the future, it's important to acknowledge that their idea of progress was inseparable from British imperialism. The imagery and ideas we're exploring in this episode represent one perspective, largely European, Western, and deeply invested in empire. And that progress often came at a tremendous human cost. In a later episode of this series, we'll explore Afrofuturism, which offers one counter-narrative to this perspective. One example where we can see how empire and progress intersected most clearly is in the spectacle of the world's fairs. particularly the Great Exhibition of 1851. This occurs in London in 1851 in Hyde Park, and it's a moment in which Great Britain stages itself for the world and invites other countries in to have displays alongside it, but really, of course, is indicating that it is the first and the best in industry and technology. People really have strong reactions just to the pure physical display. They have things there like prototypes of submarines. They have the electric telegraph, a lot of very absurdist technology, spy technology like an umbrella gun, for instance, things like taxidermy scenes alongside things like the Koh-I-Noor diamond, which had been taken from India and put on display before it was added to the crown jewels. And then other things suggesting the raw materials from which some of this technology is made. You could find rubber plants, for instance. There is just this warehouse effect of all of this stuff thrown together, the purpose of which really is to indicate that Britain is at the forefront of knowing how to use its colonies, its materials, its raw materials in the service of industry and technology, which will forward the nation. The Crystal Palace had 6.5 million visitors just in the time that it was open in 1851. So it was hugely, hugely influential. You can get a real sense of the spectacle in an 1851 print by Joseph Nash. It shows the palatial, multi-story glass structure of the Crystal Palace, with elegantly dressed visitors admiring the splendor as they wander amongst indoor greenery and marble sculptures. Little signs mark out sections for exhibiting countries such as India, Persia, and China. It's a vision of the whole world contained under one roof, strategically organized to show Britain as the hub of technological innovation. Around the same period as the Great Exhibition, things were also changing in the world of literature that mirrored the transformations happening in science and industry. New genre of writing emerges during the second half of the 19th century. Some of its authors are still known, people like H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and so on. They're authors, and it's a genre that we would now identify as science fiction. Interestingly, though, that isn't what the Victorians themselves call it. They call it scientific romance. It's telling stories about the possibilities of science, what science and technology can offer, how science and technology can change the world for good, for bad, for humor, for pathos, depending on the mood of the author, so to speak. And it's a very, very popular genre. Relatively few of those authors, you know, other than those big names like Wells, are still read at all. New kinds of magazines, magazines like Pearson's Magazines or Castles or the Sram Magazine, where the Sherlock Holmes stories initially published. They've been established. They're aimed at literate, middle-class readership, looking for interesting stuff, shall we say. They're a mixture of fiction, nonfiction, and scientific romance. So you could be reading a story by George Griffiths, one of these authors, about travel to other worlds on one page. And then on the next, you might be reading a serious scientific essay about the possibilities of space travel. In that same mix of articles and essays, you'd find pieces trying to predict the future in surprisingly specific ways. Take an 1893 text in The Strand called Future Dictates of Fashion, where author W. Wade Gall envisioned how people would dress a century later in 1993. He frames it as a chapter from a future history book, chronicling how fashion's changed over the decades. The styles stay firmly rooted in Victorian silhouettes, but with varying degrees of whimsy. In his vision of 1912, a man carries a cane as tall as a shepherd's crook, while a woman sports a conical hat that wouldn look out of place in a Renaissance fair It charming if a bit silly More often these futuristic projections focused on technology rather than fashion And when it came to imagining the technological future two themes dominated Victorian imagination above all others. If I had to sum up the Victorian future in two words, it would be electricity and flight. Okay, powered flight. We'll call powered flight a word. Really from actually quite early in the 19th century. But people are already fantasizing about a future in which steam is going to have been replaced by electricity. So there are going to be electric locomotives, there are going to be electric cars, there are going to be electric boats. New technologies like the telegraph at the end of the 1830s, and then the telephone in the 1870s, seem to show the kinds of possibilities of a future that electricity might offer. So electricity is everywhere in the Victorian future. And yes, powered flight throughout this period. Speculators, inventors, entrepreneurs trying to find ways to fly, trying to build aerial machines. There's wonderful imagery from the 1840s, Victorian flying machines. There's an aerial steam company that's established in the 1840s with the aim of really building. Spoiler alert, they don't work. But it's very much a kind of aspect of the Victorian future. One artist who spent a considerable amount of time visualizing this electric airborne future was Albert Robida. The French illustrator and writer produced extraordinary books that really tried to picture what the 20th century would look like through detailed visions of buzzing cities set in the skies. He produces these extraordinary illustrated books from the 1880s and 1890, which are called, the title themselves, you know, sort of says it all. The first one from 1882 is The 20th Century. He's writing that in 1882, and he's envisioning in text images. The text is alongside the images, which is quite an unusual form of production for work that is largely entertainment, but it also does really contain some plausible understandings of where technology was going and what technology very likely might be doing in the 20th century. He is beginning to think toward the sort of positive developments that are going to contribute to the benefit of society. Robida's views of what a city will look like with, of course, all flying vehicles. But his flying vehicles managed to be both futuristic and somehow organic and nature-based because they're vaguely fish-shaped, which is a sort of a nod to one of the unexpected general trends in futuristic thinking in the 19th century was the idea that human beings were going to conquer the ocean and that living underwater was going to be another realm, another place for colonization in one's empire. I suppose one could think of it. In one of Robida's illustrations, we see his vision of a vertical city. Tall pylons rise into the sky with wires crisscrossing everywhere, creating an intricate web of electric infrastructure. A woman stands casually on the back of an open-air flying machine, handing a piece of paper to a concierge on a balcony. Her driver sits patiently in the front seat, hands on a steering wheel that looks rather like something you'd find on a ship. It's a surprisingly sophisticated aircraft in that it seems to hover in place without any visible propellers. Other flying machines dot the background, all of them necessary for navigating a city that's been built higher and higher into the sky. It's remarkable to think that Robida was imagining life lived in the skies while the first successful flight was still a couple of decades away. That little detail didn't stop writers and artists from taking this aspiration even further with visions of going to space. People have told stories about going to the moon or what had you since the 17th century, at least. There's a key difference between those kind of 17th century stories where they fantasize about saying, going to the moon carried on a chariot pulled by a flock of geese or a flock of swans. Nobody really thinks that's a possibility. You know, the moon is going to be a place for a utopian account of a perfect society as a rule. By the late 19th century, on the other hand, when somebody like Wells or Verne or Griffith or Aster talks about going to the moon or traveling in space, they really think of it as something that is technologically feasible. Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon tell the story of a gun club that builds a giant cannon-like space gun to launch three people to the moon. Illustrations by French artists Emile Antoine Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville for the 1874 edition offer brilliant glimpses of scenes from the story. In one such image, we see the bullet-shaped space capsule called the Colombiad, with a dog that's been flung out of a window. While the conical shape of the capsule isn't far from what would eventually be built, other details look quite odd to us now. The men walk on the moon in regular clothes, for instance. So this speaks to the limits of the Victorian imagination when it came to the realities of space. But make no mistake, Verne's legacy was hugely influential, and we see that when space travel becomes real in the next century. This is the commander of Apollo 11. A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the moon. His spaceship, Columbia, took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean. after completing a trip to the moon. Seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth in the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow. That's astronaut Neil Armstrong reflecting on Jules Verne's work and the similarities of the Columbia module and their Columbia module, which was returning from its journey from the moon. In the case of John Jacob Astor's novel about space travel, his interest in the subject tied into an issue that's very pressing to us now. The Industrial Revolution is providing, even as early as the 1860s, concerns about issues that we would now call climate change. And there are writers envisioning a future in which human beings have had an indelible mark on the planet, which occurs so much earlier than anyone might expect. There's a fascinating novel written in 1894, for example, by John Jacob Astor. And that's Astor as in the Astor family. Hugely, hugely wealthy. It's not a terribly good piece of writing, but it's a fascinating insight into how one of the world's wealthiest men during the 1890s Imagine the Future. It's set in the year 2000, Natch. It's called A Journey in Space, and most of it is just that. The heroes go off in an electrically powered space traveling machine called the Callisto. They going on their travel through space to celebrate the fact that they just completed this huge technological achievement to straighten the Earth axis If you straighten the Earth axis then the notion is that get rid of the seasons Why do you want to get rid of the seasons You want to get rid of the seasons so that you can carry on growing crops all the year round. It's a way of maximizing profits. It's a way of taking control. And yes, the future as imagined by these kinds of authors, other imaginers of the future, is a future in which it's the technology that makes that future and that therefore means it's who owns that technology, who invents. Those are going to be the people who control that future. Illustrations for Astor's books show that familiar bullet-shaped capsule floating amongst a starry sky, sending out signals from high above the North Pole. This theme of technological control over nature appears elsewhere too, In Robida's The Electric Life, one illustration shows the Egyptian desert in the middle of a downpour. The Sphinx is immediately recognizable alongside a pyramid in the background, but now palm trees and grass grow all around. The idea is that the terrain has been technologically transformed in the future in some way to make it arable, bending nature to human will. In many ways, these visions of the future are intimately connected to questions of power. Whoever wields the technology wields control. That means we also find themes relating to future warfare. In some of Wells' works, in George Griffith's work, that shower over the air is going to be crucial in future warfare. By around about 1900, everybody pretty much understands or thinks that there's going to be a big European war. They don't all agree as to who's going to be fighting who, but it's universally assumed there is going to be war. And it's also largely assumed that whichever one of the European powers gets powered flight first is going to win that war because there will be no possible response to their attacks. There'll be these flying machines, flying over cities, dropping bombs, using electrical weaponry. They're going to dominate the skies and they're therefore going to dominate politics. So again, that notion of Light as crucial to domination of the air, domination of the land, electricity as the agent of change is everywhere in these scientific romances. As the century turned, imaginations shifted too. People started looking a full hundred years ahead to the year 2000, wondering what everyday life might look like in a new millennium. You get people producing that kind of imagery. In France, for example, they produce these series of cigar box cards. They're all titled On Land Der Mille in the year 2000. And they depict, I mean, partially humorous, partially serious images of what that future is going to be like. You have a woman sitting in her bedroom with machinery around her, basically doing her hair whilst the kind of automatic cleaning machine is kind of working away. Or you have imagery of a farmer working their field with electrical equipment. Lots and lots of imagery of flying machines of various kinds, aerial warfare, electrical moving walkways so that you don't have to walk anywhere. You just kind of hop onto the walkway and it carries you to wherever you want to go. My favorite is an image of a classroom. You have several rows of desks. There's a boy sitting at each desk. They each have what look to the modern eyes, kind of little headsets attached to their heads, attached to wire in the ceiling. I think the wire leads to the machine in the corner where the teacher is putting books into the machine. So this kind of notion that knowledge is now going to be directly transmitted into these people's heads through electricity. They don't need to read the books anymore. They'll be able to access it all through electricity. They'll learn through electricity. They're often highly whimsical and meant to be a little silly, but fascinating about the potential of what it was possible in this moment for people to envision the future to look like. He also has some drawing on innovations from the 1890s in discovering, for instance, radium. He has a radiator that people are standing around, a fireplace that is lit with radium. Other illustrations from the set Imagine Life lived under the sea, where soldiers ride on hippos, people play underwater croquet, and kids take their pet crabs out for a stroll. Meanwhile on land, everyday tasks like cleaning, grooming, and farming have been mechanized. In one card titled Intensive Brooding, a woman places eggs onto a conveyor belt that instantly incubates them into little chicks who slide down a cheerful yellow slide on the other side. Some of these ideas feel surprisingly prescient, like an electric sweeping machine that could be compared to a vacuum cleaner. Others, like a lively frog dance party, remind us that fantasy and genuine speculation were never far apart in the Victorian imagination. I mean, there's a kind of fascinating symbiosis, I think. I mean, certainly in Victorian culture, between what authors imagine and inventors, engineers, what have you, then try and make as a kind of back and forth. Writers write their technological fantasies about the future using the technology that they know, so to speak, as the kind of basic ingredient. So they fantasize about what's the next step. So they're kind of extrapolating from those existing new exciting technologies to even more new and exciting technologies that are going to emerge out of that. These kinds of visions are both entertaining and educational because they allow people to dream. As any good science fiction does, it allows you to consider, well, what is possible by thinking outside the box. And it tells you both about the culture itself and its concerns and fascinations, but also about its dreams and what might spark future innovators to follow through. If you're eager to see images from today's episode, there are links in the show notes to the Object website, as well as a link to our season partner, The Public Domain Review, which has many, many images related to today's theme. Thanks to my guests for this episode, Ewan Reese Morris and Nancy Rose Marshall. This episode was researched, written, and produced by myself, Farron Gibson, and the original score you're hearing was composed specifically for this season's theme by my husband, Tom Lloyd. If you'd like to support this independent podcast, the best way is to share it with a friend. You can follow this show anywhere you get your podcasts, and now you can subscribe to Object Plus on Apple Podcasts to get early access to episodes, plus bonus monthly episodes called Field Notes, where I talk about interesting things that come up in my research that don't quite make it into the show. If imagining a journey to the moon with Jules Verne piqued your interest in this episode, be sure to join me next time as we explore the space age. See you there.
