Three Old Cartoons That Look Strangely Familiar Today
Looking back at old cartoons about the future can be entertaining. They are full of flying vehicles, elaborate machines and inventions that never went anywhere.
Others are interesting for a different reason. The imagined device may never have existed in quite the form the artist drew it, but the situation itself feels familiar.
These three cartoons by George du Maurier, Lewis Baumer and H. T. Webster belong to that group. None depicts today’s technology as we know it. Yet people talking to distant relatives through a screen, a couple sitting together while occupied with wireless devices, and a machine doing a cartoonist’s work no longer seem particularly strange.
The Other Side of the Screen
George du Maurier’s Edison’s Telephonoscope (Transmits Light As Well As Sound), made for Punch’s Almanack for 1879, shows a London couple talking to distant family members through a large screen.
Edison was in fact working on an instrument he called a “telephonoscope” around this period. It was not, however, the system for transmitting moving images over a distance imagined in du Maurier’s cartoon. Du Maurier took the possibilities surrounding new communications technology and carried them considerably further.
The screen itself looks little like anything we use today. The scene is another matter: people sitting at home, seeing and talking to someone far away through a screen.
Du Maurier’s imaginary device never arrived. Talking to distant people on a screen eventually became routine.
Together, Somewhere Else
Lewis Baumer’s cartoon, published in Punch on December 26, 1906, shows a woman and a man sitting beside one another in Hyde Park.
The original caption makes the joke explicit: the two figures are not communicating with each other. The woman is receiving an amorous message while the man is getting racing results.
More than a century later, it is not the imagined equipment that looks most familiar. People sitting together in a park, café or on public transport while concentrating on their phones have become an ordinary sight.
Baumer’s 1906 scene hardly needs updating.
When the Machine Draws the Cartoon
H. T. Webster’s 1923 cartoon moves away from communication and into the cartoonist’s own workplace. The year Webster chose for his imagined future was 2023.
Beside the cartoonist are machines labelled “Idea Dynamo” and “Cartoon Dynamo.” Drawings emerge from the machinery while the cartoonist talks on the telephone and makes plans to go fishing.
Webster’s machines were not artificial intelligence in the modern sense. The cartoon came from an era in which electricity and mechanisation were changing the way people worked.
But Webster carried automation all the way into his own profession. Even the business of coming up with the idea had been handed to a machine.
These three cartoons span almost half a century. Du Maurier imagined images travelling across great distances, Baumer looked at wireless communication entering everyday life, and Webster carried mechanisation into creative work.
None described today’s technology exactly as it would eventually appear. Each simply took the technology of its own time and pushed the joke a little further.
Sources
- The Morgan Library & Museum — George du Maurier, Edison’s Telephonoscope
- Heidelberg University Library — Punch’s Almanack for 1879
- Public Domain Image Archive — George du Maurier
- Public Domain Image Archive — Lewis Baumer
- Wikimedia Commons — H. T. Webster, Cartoon Dynamo
- Ars Technica — H. T. Webster’s 1923 Cartoon Dynamo
