Before AI: 10 Cartoons About New Technology
New machines quickly found their way into cartoons.
John Tenniel was drawing telephones and electric lights in 1879. A few years later, E. W. Kemble was making jokes about possible uses for electricity. Cars, airplanes, moving pictures and radio followed.
The ten cartoons in this selection date from 1879 to the 1920s. Some make fun of the machines themselves; others look at what happened when people started using them.
John Tenniel
Prometheus Unbound; or, Science in Olympus
New inventions have reached Olympus. Tenniel fills the scene with contemporary technology, including a telephone, electric light and power press.
E. W. Kemble
Some Uses for Electricity
Kemble imagines a list of improbable uses for electricity: dealing with criminals, cats, salesmen, schoolchildren, waiters and messengers.
Charles Jay Taylor
Puck’s Labor-Saving Suggestion for Cupid’s Summer Work
Cupid has lost his bow. In its place, Puck operates an electric machine for firing the arrows.
Winsor McCay
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend: Bucking Automobile
McCay turns the automobile into a nightmare. It bucks, crashes and throws its passengers around before the dreamer wakes.
Udo J. Keppler
Privileged Sport
A speeding car is surrounded by newspaper reports of pedestrians injured or killed in automobile accidents.
L. M. Glackens
Young America and the Moving-Picture Show
Glackens looks at the influence of moving pictures on children. His cartoon links what they watch at the cinema with what they do afterwards.
Bryant Baker
The Old and the New
The year 1911 arrives by airplane. Father Time watches from below, beside the wreck of an automobile marked “1910.”
Modest Stein
A Live Wire
One telephone, twelve men. Stein turns the expanding telephone network into a joke about a young woman’s social life.
Herbert Johnson
The Trouble Man
Freddie knows about radio. Unfortunately for him, so does everyone in the neighbourhood who needs help with one.
John C. Conacher
A salesman tells a farmer that a tractor would let him do twice as much work. The farmer isn’t convinced that doing twice as much work is much of a selling point.
Telephones, cars, cinema and radio eventually became ordinary. These cartoons come from the period before that happened.
For cartoonists, a new machine meant one more new thing to make jokes about.
