A street in Paris transformed and overrun by rolling paths, house-to-house walkways and overhead lines. We see, in all directions, aircraft, aerobus, air trains ... "This description of a capital converted to flying transport is not taken from the program of Anne Hidalgo or another candidate at the next municipal elections, but with a play written ... a hundred years ago!
Performed for the first time on December 10, 1920 at the Châtelet theater in Paris, "In the year 2020" recounts the incredible adventures of Benjamin Pirouette. Plunged into sleep for a century following a scientific experiment, this employee wakes up on April 30, 2020. The author of the play, Henry de Gorsse (1868-1936), a sort of Jules Verne from the theater, imagines a future which is surprisingly fair in many ways.
Released in Paris, his hero falls from the clouds in front of the moving sidewalks, the police armed with "electric sticks" which are reminiscent of the Taser, the phones equipped with cameras that have nothing to envy to today's smartphones , or "a small locomotive with brooms", like our robot vacuums.
On the society side, "In the year 2020" prophesies the advent of vegetarians ("Today, we no longer eat meat", explains his valet to a bewildered Benjamin Pirouette), the decline of marriage, now celebrated by a phonograph girded with a tricolor scarf as mayor, and even #MeToo! According to one of the heroines, who is at the same time a banker, an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor and a member of parliament, “it was only right that, after twenty centuries of subjugation and uselessness, women should have the place in the 21st century to the sun which is due to him! "
A visionary on many aspects, Henry de Gorsse is mistaken on others. Despite real progress, it takes far more than three hours today to make a round trip France-Brazil by plane. And fortunately, we do not feed exclusively on "pills of ozone, carbohydrate and phosphorus" ...
Difficult to imagine mails in 1959
Many playwrights, writers, filmmakers, advertisers or journalists have imagined what it would look like tomorrow. With more or less success. In 1957, the monthly Mechanix Illustrated was counting on a flying bus system, while another American newspaper, Popular Mechanics Magazine, imagined, by way of roads, tunnels functioning like pneumatic tubes. An idea that resembles The Boring Company, the project of billionaire Elon Musk.
A few years earlier, in 1951, the same newspaper had been less inspired by saying that we would move around with personal helicopters that we would put away in our garages every night ... In 1959, a military missile delivered 3000 letters on a base in Florida, after traveling 160 kilometers. Sufficient to make the director of the American post office say at the time that, in the 2020s, "we would send mail with rockets to the other end of the Earth". It was without counting the emails!
Live up to 130 years
Sometimes these Nostradamus had flair, but got carried away by their rantings. In 1968, a journalist for the weekly Paris Match said: “In 2020, the French will live 130 years. Life expectancy has increased, but it is currently "only" 85.3 years for women and 79.4 years for men. Ditto for trips to Mars. In 1997, the American magazine Wired wrote that 2020 would be the year when humans walk on the Red Planet.
"The four astronauts land and transmit their images to the 11 billion people sharing the moment," said the authors of the article. They were excited: according to the latest estimates from NASA, the Martian conquest is not expected until the 2030s, or even after. Like what, the future is not for tomorrow.