Illustrations from Albert Robida’s, Le vingtième siècle: la vie électrique (Paris: La Librairie Illustrée, 1893). Robida is sometimes credited with imagining something like a combination of Zoom and Netflix, but in doing so he proved the point that we often imagine technological advances in a way so as to protect our interests. For a detailed discussion of Robida’s work, and his all-too-self-serving predictions of the future, see the essay at The Public Domain Review here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/albert-robida-la-vie-electrique
