Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

By Cornelia

I have long been fascinated by antique visions of the future--images and ideas about what life would be like some decades hence, that so often reveal more about one's present than the true outcome of temporally distant events. They are so often better at recording a contemporary sense of style and art direction than they are at revealing any true prescience, not least about fashion.

I love the deco sensibilities of what space-age life was imagined as in the Thirties, from appropriate rocket wear:



To the rockets themselves:


I love the Sixties conception of futuristic architecture, via the New York World's Fair:


I remember reading in my mother's high school year book some 1957 senior's imaginings about the class's 25th reunion to be, which would be held at the school's newly completed lunar campus:


I love the gadgets everyone expected we'd have in our future lives, a la the Jetsons, not least the personal Jet Pack:



And the ubiquitous space-cars that sped along glassy highways on cushions of air:


And the machines that would produce any favorite item of food by some alchemical recombination of molecules, ending world hunger in an atomic flash:


Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: Next Generation is famous for having always ordered, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

There are some visions which are better left unremembered, however, especially those from the Seventies:



Many of which seem to have come to aesthetic fruition in certain cities' subway stations:


Can anyone walk through Atlanta's MARTA or some of D.C.'s train stops without thinking of Logan's Run?

Or visit some architectural outposts of Denver without thinking of Woody Allen's Sleeper?


And then, of course, there are the computers:


Both real and imagined. When you look at those pictured below, can you remember how impossible it would have been to imagine, say, Youtube, only twenty years ago?










Even Kubrick thought the computers of the future would take up the amount of space necessary for a small metropolitan museum:




How bizarre that this morning, I can create for free from the safety of my desk a virtual television, in this online journal, which shows HAL speaking and singing in French:



As Dave turns him off, he begins to sing not "Bicycle Built for Two," But "Claire de Lune."

I still really really really want my own Jet Pack, and having a replicator sure wouldn't suck, especially when I realize I forgot to buy the essential ingredient for the evening's dinner.

What future gadget did you most want, as a kid?