These Vintage Ideas of the Future Were Actually Pretty Impressive

Giant Curved Screen In a Stadium

Space Explorers Staring at the Horizon

This is a painting by a German futurist named Klaus Bürgle in 1965. It was painted for Das Neue Universum, a young readers book anthology with stories from science, research, and entertainment. It ran from 1880 to 2002. In this image, we see two astronauts opening the door to a space ship seeing a red planet in the sky. If you look closely, it also looks like there is a city on the horizon. Why didn’t they land closer to the civilization? We may never know the answer to the secrets of the painting, because the artist passed away in 2015.

A City Under the Sea

Here is yet another painting by Klaus Bürgle. This time, he imagined that humans would begin building a civilization under the sea. Today, there are actually quite a few underwater hotels out there. So it wasn’t too far off from the truth. However, we can see that his imagination took him to a place where there was an entire city in the ocean. This would probably never happen, because it would be very expensive and dangerous. Most people don’t want to live under water.

Tomorrowland at Disneyland Is a Futurist Theme Park

The entire concept of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland was Futurist at its time. The park first opened in 1955, and it featured a lot of futurist concepts like space ships, astronauts, and space stations. The park is still popular today, because it’s an iconic part of Disneyland. In 2015, Disney came out with a movie called Tomorrowland that featured many of the same themes that we see in the movie. However, the movie flopped in the box office because it was not as popular as Disney may have expected it to be.

“Teleyeglasses” Envisioned Television Goggles

This image shows an inventor named Hugo Gernsback demonstrating his television goggles, also known as “teleyeglasses” in 1963 for Life Magazine. Some of his other inventions were an electric hair brush/comb and a battery-powered handheld illuminated mirror. He has been dubbed “the man who invented science fiction” because he founded a publication called Amazing Stories Magazine. This proposed invention makes so much more sense than the massive headset that was made four years later in 1967. In a lot of ways, these goggles are reminiscent of a modern VR headset, except for the antennas on the top.

Armored Pushcarts to Protect Soldiers on the Battlefield

This issue of Popular Mechanics from 1915 suggests putting soldiers in armored push carts while they are on the battlefield. On Reddit, quite a few people joked about how inefficient this would actually be. One of the top comments says, “For use on those famous flat obstruction free WW1 no-mans land.” Another said, “Lovely well maintained lawns. Just right for those small castor wheels.” Harsh, but true. No army would ever use this, because they are like bringing your own coffin to the battlefield. There is a good reason why these push carts were never actually invented.

Sega VR: The Headset That Never Was

Yet another company to come out with a vintage VR headset was Sega in the 1990’s. It was planned to be an add-on accessory to the Sega Genesis. And for a while, they were confident that it would be released, because it was shown at several trade shows and expositions. But this would never come to fruition, because the company ran into too many technical issues. On Reddit, one of the top comments said, “I want the alternate timeline where Sega invents the Metaverse, not Facebook.” Same.

When Will We Finally Get Flying Cars?

This next illustration looks like something straight out of The Jetsons. We will probably never get flying cars, because they would be too expensive for the average person. On Reddit, people were arguing over the safety of this vehicle design. Many people argue it would never work because of the poor visibility underneath the aircraft.

How did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

Retro future predictions that show how people from the past imagined the future, 1900s-1970s. Rare Historical Photos.

Man Amplifier Cornell Lab 1962-1966. AllAboutImages. YouTube

RetroFuturism. Reddit.