Past Futures: How Victorian Londoners Predicted 21st Century Tech

Mobile phones, video calls, pay-per-view sport... even Wikipedia.

Image: iStock, adapted by Matt Brown

Nobody could have predicted the internet, right? Wrong. Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, when people like Edison and Bell were inventing modern communications, all kinds of predictions were made about where the rapid progress might take us. Video conferencing, transatlantic sports broadcasts, mobile phone…