Back in 1909 , a notional New York Times journalist decided to spice thing up by venture to describe a futurist 2009 “ centennial celebration . ” His portrayal of future NYC is astonishingly eco - witting and pedestrian - well-disposed .
Thanks to flesh history scholar Jess Nevins , we ’ve got access to a transcribed version of this storey , written by secret author and diarist Stephen Chalmers .
Here is a particularly delicious passage , where the author describes the design of “ telephotogravures , ” the abolition of the “ crude ” auto , and the preponderance of flying machines in the sky :
It is funny and interesting to us at this tardy sidereal day to probe and compare photo of the celebrations of 1909 with the telegravures which we publish elsewhere in today ’s issue . Aside from the dependent interest of these modern pictures we can not help noticing and annotate on the variety in method of production and reproduction , even in the detail of the modernistic arts . Yet even in the year 1909 it was no discipline for disbelief that the taking and making of picture by wireless color telephotogravure was about to supersede the quaint , and even then archaic , television camera method .
In the telegravures of the late celebrations , which we publish elsewhere in this upshot , we realize at a glance what has happened in this old but ever newfangled world during the 100 year which have slide by since the centennial ’s first celebration . We are at once struck by the absence of all wheeled vehicle on land and of all funneled or masted surface vessel at sea . The street which were crowded by all sort and conditions of more or less crude vehicles are to - twenty-four hours devoted to pedestrian traffic , always take out babe ’ perambulators . The latter , it is interesting to return , were at the time of which we speak the daily and finical dupe of the automobile , which is now an obsolte peculiarity , while babies and perambulators make it and have do to their own gain . A nanny could now wheel a perambulator containing twins from the Battery to 775th Street , succeed the middle of Broadway , and read a book undisturbed and in arrant safety — only , of class , no nursemaid would be foolish enough to essay the project on understructure .
The cracking modification , to return to the telegravures , is to be note in the sudden thoroughgoing appearance of the atmosphere watercraft as a landscape painting feature . In olden days a writer of the quixotic school state that no picture of the Torrid Zone was complete that did not contain at least a mote represent a turkey buzzard in the ground . We might say that to - twenty-four hours no photograph is complete that does not have an airship somewhere in the back - sky . In the celebration pictures we find the aerovessel , almost absent from the celebrations of 1909 , crowding in upon the visual sensation as taxicab did around the one-time - fashioned house one hundred years ago . We find the aerovessel in its many forms — from the individual - seated skimmer to the vast aerocruisers , of which the Martian case is perhaps the ok example — equivalent to the Dreadnaught of the ante - pax day . Also , we comprehend along the ocean coast and on the Hudson River a type of watercraft which was not foreshadowed even at the time of the first centennial celebrations — the submarine and flying leghorn , in playfully sobriqued the “ susky - marine . ” Of course , the gradual elimination of dry land and ocean surface travel made it inevitable that the submarine aerovessel should have the monopoly of the dry land and the water supply under the earth . It is hardly necessary to come back the case of the last of the sometime blade combat ship , the Amerigo , which founder in 1947 with all souls after having been divide by the Flying Diver ( Jupiter : 2d category ; 10 v.c . ) as the latter slam from the ocean bed to the air leap .
You canread the whole thing on Jess Nevins ’ excellent blog , Slouching Towards Bethlehem . Thanks to Nevins for transcribe this whole unhinged story !
Future metroFuturismjess nevinsNew York City
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