How 1900 imagined the year 2000: a Belle Epoque chromolithograph postcard illustration showing gentlemen in top hats and ladies in bustle dresses riding personal flying machines with flapping mechanical wings above a Paris of ornate iron and glass. Pneumatic tube stations, an airborne postman. Flat printed colors, fine engraved linework, aged paper with foxing

A 1930s streamline moderne Art Deco illustration of the future, filling the entire image edge to edge as the artwork itself. NOT a photograph of a poster, NOT framed, no room visible — the illustration IS the whole picture. A colossal teardrop-shaped chrome locomotive speeding past a stepped ziggurat skyscraper with zeppelins moored to its spire, radiating speed lines. Cream, oxblood and gold

How the 1950s imagined the future: a cheerful atomic-age advertisement illustration of a suburban kitchen powered by a small domestic nuclear reactor sitting proudly in the corner like an appliance, a smiling housewife pressing a button, chrome and pastel formica everywhere, atom motifs on the wallpaper. Optimistic mid-century commercial art, printed halftone texture

How the 1960s imagined the future: Space Age modernism — an all-white moulded plastic interior with egg chairs, curved seamless walls, a circular porthole window looking onto a lunar surface, a woman in a silver A-line minidress and white go-go boots. Bold primary accents, glossy surfaces, period fashion photography look

How the 1970s imagined the future: the interior of an O'Neill cylinder space colony painted in the style of a NASA Ames concept illustration — the landscape curving up and over the viewer's head, suburban houses, lakes and forests wrapping around the inside of the cylinder, long mirrored window strips admitting sunlight. Soft airbrushed gouache

How the 1980s imagined the future: dense neon cyberpunk street level — rain-slick asphalt, towering kanji and hangul signage, chunky CRT monitors in shop windows, a figure in a long coat, steam from grates, magenta and cyan light everywhere, visible film grain and anamorphic flares. Period sci-fi film aesthetic

How the 1990s imagined the future: early 3D computer graphics rendering of cyberspace — a flat-shaded wireframe grid landscape receding to a horizon, low-polygon geometric buildings, chrome spheres, lens flare, a person wearing a bulky virtual reality headset and wired glove. Low resolution, banded gradients, period CGI limitations visible

How the year 2000 imagined the future: Y2K aesthetic — a translucent bubble-shaped personal device and inflatable furniture in an all-white room, liquid chrome blobs, iridescent surfaces shifting between silver, lilac and mint, soft studio lighting, glossy product photography of an object that does nothing identifiable

How the Joseon dynasty might have imagined the future: a machine age built entirely from traditional Korean materials — an enormous automaton of lacquered wood, hanji paper and brass driven by water wheels and silk cords, housed inside a tiled-roof hall, scholars in hanbok operating it with wooden levers, ink diagrams pinned to a folding screen. Warm lamplight, no plastic or steel anywhere