Visions of the future
Our podcast editor ELLIE CAWTHORNE discusses a recent episode that reveals the Victorians to have been more forward-thinking than we might imagine
When the Victorians pictured the year 2000, what did they see? “They imagined the 20th century as an almost entirely electrical century. People would be travelling in electric cars or zooming about in new-fangled flying machines. You would pick up a phone to order your supper, and it would be electronically delivered to you”. Sound familiar?
Iwan Rhys Morus joined me on our podcast this month to speak about the Victorians’ visions of the future, and the staggeringly ambitious inventions they hoped would get them there. This was a time when innovation moved at a dizzying pace, each development opening up new vistas of possibility. “Even within a decade of steam locomotion being established, it was already being seen as old hat,” says Morus. “Electricity was the future.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, this electrical future was often imagined to be a renewable one. One 1894 novel by tycoon John Jacob Astor (set aboard a spacecraft in the year 2000) offers up a potted history of a 20th century powered by electricity generated by windmills, waterfalls and lightning. Others fantasised about harnessing solar power.
But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that the Victorians were dreaming up these renewable futures because they had anything even remotely resembling our own environmental concerns. While there were worries about over-reliance on coal, these were not about the damage wreaked by non-renewable fuel sources. “Quite simply, they knew that coal would run out and they would need to find other ways of fuelling the empire” says Morus. “So using what we see now as ‘renewable energy’ simply seemed like the logical conclusion. But let’s not forget that many of the issues of over-industrialisation and environmental destruction we have to deal with today are a legacy of the Victorians’ entanglement of science and technology with imperial ideology. They believed that the world was there to provide them with the resources they needed to run the empire.”
But is there anything we might be able to learn from these obsessive innovators when planning for our own sustainable future? “The Victorians were brilliant at transforming how things were done, inventing new ways of thinking about technology and the future. Like them, we too can think about new ways of doing what’s needed to save our planet.”