In the 19th century, rapid technological change became a catalyst for artists to visualize the future – and flight was a common theme.
Humans have always been engaged in forecasting: we want to know what will happen next. We haven’t always listened – Cassandra’s warnings from Greek mythology were doomed to be ignored – and throughout history and across cultures, the only vision of the future has been that of the end. For many classical Western artists, depicting “the future” meant painting scenes from the Book of Revelation; Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, and Hieronymus Bosch reminded the viewer that life on Earth is finite, a handy reminder from the church to keep an eye on it.
If the future was fixed and apocalyptic, pre-modern writers and artists looked sideways to consider the existence of more advanced cultures. When most of the world was still unexplored, it was possible to imagine that there might be a land inhabited by a fantastic civilization just over the horizon. The Greeks had Hyperborea, where the inhabitants could live for a thousand years. Thomas More had Utopia, essentially a socialized state. Jonathan Swift had the floating island of Laputa, which was kept afloat by “magnetic force.”
But by the 19th century, global imperialism had shrunk these “uncharted” spaces. At the same time, rapid advances in science and technology laid the groundwork for a different possible future, and also increased anxiety about what those possibilities might bring. And as people began to imagine this, artists began to put these ideas on the page.
When we think of futurists, we often think of scientists, science fiction writers, and industrial leaders. But what about the contribution of visual art pioneers? Artists have combined science, design, and pulp art traditions to consider everyday possibilities that could change our lives. How has the dissemination of these ideas through advertising and the media shaped our changing picture of what the future will look like? And how has the world around them shaped their ideas about the future?
A flight of fancy
Our modern idea of the future has been largely shaped by the last two centuries. Until the 19th century, technological change during the short human lifespan was minimal, and most people did not have enough free time to sit back and think about abstract concepts like the future. Perhaps more importantly, expressing ideas that challenge conventional wisdom about reality can have dangerous consequences. Suggestions that the Earth revolves around the Sun or that there might be life on other planets were factors that led to the Italian philosopher and cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake in 1600.
A page from The Vanity of Dogmatism. Joseph Glanville, 1661.
Over time, people began to express these dissenting ideas without being punished – and some began to look to the future. Sixty years after Bruno, the English philosopher Joseph Glenville took a huge step when he suggested in his 1661 book The Vanity of Dogmatism that one day a trip to the moon “will not be more strange than a trip to America.” His concept of global communication through “magnetic waves” predated the electric telegraph by 176 years.
The 19th century brought us closer to Glanvill’s future, as completely new technologies were introduced at a rapid pace. Their potential influenced fiction: The flights of the first aeronauts inspired Jules Verne’s five weeks in a hot air balloon; experiments with electricity and galvanism partly inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and H.G. Wells, whose Expectations covered everything from the mechanical modernization of warfare to the reorganization of class structures, hoped his ideas could “subvert and destroy the monarch, monogamy, belief in God, respectability, and the British Empire, all under the guise of speculating about automobiles and electric heating.”
Nineteenth-century artists also participated in the game of futurism. In previous centuries, art was mainly concerned with capturing and interpreting reality, or the metaphysical, through religious and mythological imagery. But excitement about the technological leaps of the present-and the potential leaps of the future-pushed us to want to see it.
Our desire to conquer the air has been an ancient obsession – from Icarus and his wings to Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a propeller in 1493 – but the first practical flight did not occur until the Mongolfier brothers’ balloon flight in 1783. This event became a catalyst for writers and artists to explore new frontiers: Verne and Edgar Allan Poe published tall tales of aeronauts, even traveling to the moon in The Incomparable Adventure of One Hans Pfaff.
Early futurist artists filled their skies with aircraft of various sizes and purposes. Writer and illustrator Albert Robida envisioned a time of personal flying machines used for walks to the opera, airships for public transportation, and even luxury floating casinos.
While Poe envisioned balloons going to the moon, others envisioned more conventional uses, such as floating streetlights from the year 2000. “Speculations on the Future” by Fred Jane, Pall Mall Magazine, 1894.
Although flight was the main thread in his work, he developed other devices that have become an integral part of everyday life, such as the Téléphonoscope, from the 1890s “The Twentieth Century: Electric Life”, a screen for entertainment such as live opera broadcasts or reports from the front. He even envisioned interactive features such as home shopping.
Enthusiasm for this new world was not only reserved for professional artists. Between 1899 and 1921, Charles Delschau, a retired butcher who claimed to be a member of a secret society called the Sonora Aero Club, filled 13 notebooks with 2,500 drawings, paintings, and collages of ideas for air travel and airships. Rescued from a garbage dump decades later, they were eventually shown to the public in 1969, the same year that humans first landed on the moon.
The romance of flight was also explored by the illustrator Harry Grant Dart, who in 1908 created his own comic strip about the airship, The Explorator. He was also a cartoonist for Life and Judge magazine, where his satirical cartoons were less optimistic than many of his works. futurist contemporaries, channeling anxiety and paranoia about where technological change might lead.