Real time travel (the kind that physically takes you to ancient Egypt or the 25th century) still is not possible, but our understanding of time has grown in recent decades. Advances in physics in the early 20th century (particularly the work of Albert Einstein) made it possible to question the essential fabric of time. Physics aside, our current notion of a world dominated by clocks, watches and deadlines hasn’t alwaysbeenuniversal.Theperiodoftransitiontoamodernworld—onewithrailway schedulestoobserveandfactoryemployeepunchclockstofear—tooktimeandleft material traces, some of which are on display in this exhibition. The exhibition is also an attempt to foster an affinity with the people throughout history who attempted to predict from a distance the world we’re living in now. From the earliest examples of prophetic writing, authors have faced a choice between the paths of optimism or pessimism, usually in the service of an agenda: optimistically imagining the results of a society based on Enlightenment ideals, for instance, or foreseeing the dire consequences of environmental abuse.The 1930s assured us that the “World of Tomorrow” was just around the corner, and that it was bringing revolutionary convenience to the home and unparalleled lethal force to the battlefield in equal measure—progress and destruction sharing a seat in the same futuristic motorcar. Each example here is a reminder that the dream of time travel has an eternal appeal, and that when we imagine the decades and centuries ahead of us we’re following a long human tradition of reaching out to times beyond our own.
S C I N A H C E M E E M I H T T OF Time seems so natural and straightforward that it’s easy to take it for granted. In fact, time has a history of its own, and we experience time today in ways that vary slightly, but significantly, from those of the past. In the early years of the twentieth century, work by scientists like Albert Einstein destabilized our comfortable understanding of time at a fundamental level, destroying even the most basic assumption: that timepassesatthesamespeedforeveryoneinevery situation. But Einstein’s theories of relativity— seemingly the product of abstract thought at the highest levels—actually found some of their inspiration in the practical world of timekeeping.
As Einstein was working with synchronized time in developing his relativity theories, cities around the world were attempting to meet a new demand for accurate time. (Minute hands weren’t even common on clocks before the 19th century.) In Paris a system of pneumatic tubes ran below the streets and into residents’ homes, connecting to their wallmountedclocks.MeanwhileinProvidence,theLadd Observatory determined astronomically-precise time and provided it to residents and businesses by telegraph cables. The artifacts on display in this case offer the opportunity to rethink time and our relationship to it. Encountering the history of time allows us to imagine life in a setting where days aren’t structured by minutes and seconds and where precise, synchronized time is a commodity.
Our society, confident in the steady march of technological progress, continues to chase the vision of the 1939 World’s Fair. But it’s worth pausing to remember that other visions of the future have been abandoned and forgotten. Sometimes the erasure is for the best, as when the envisioned future is founded on inequality. Even todaywecontinuetoerasethepast,throughpassiveneglectandactiveignorance. A portal should be transformative, and our hope is that this exhibition offers an opportunity to rethink your relationship to time. Angela DiVeglia, Curatorial Assistant & Jordan Goffin, Head Curator of Collections exhibition curators
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F O S D L R O W TOMORROW Prognostication is a dangerous undertaking. Setting out a vision of a possible future almost guarantees that someone decades or centuries in the actual future will look back at your speculations and mock them. It’s hard to resist the impulse to laugh at the fanciful predictions of human and technological evolution that we’ve already lived long enough to prove false, from gold mines on the moon to a world completely dominated by audiobooks. But in many cases the predictions do come to pass
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(we tend to notice only the failures, after all), and in other cases they may be just around the corner. Even when they fail we can find within them a sense of curiosity similar to our own. The fervor for predictions of the future was at its height in the United States between the turn of the century and the years following the Great Depression, culminating in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, whose motto was “The World of Tomorrow.” Whatwillourownpredictionsofthefuturelook like to those studying our time a century from now? Can these examples from the past suggest pitfalls for us to avoid as we speculate about the future?
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L U F R FEA UTURES F
While much speculative writing trumpets the possibilities of progress, other writing flows from our deepseated fearsabout the future.Dystopianwriting— reflecting anxiety about the negative potential of new ideas and institutions, or expressing uneasiness about rapid rates of change—tends to magnify the mass fears of its time. For instance, the fictional“Hiroshima, U.S.A.”, published during the early years of the Cold War, illustrates the fiery destruction a nuclear attack could wreak on an American city. J.C. Leyendecker’s 1939 illustrated Saturday Evening Post cover, showing his iconic New Year’s baby sporting a gas mask, reflects
similar American anxieties over foreign attack, this time during World War II. Anothercommondystopiansub-genretakes place in the wake of environmental collapse, pandemics, and other kinds of worldwide catastrophe. After London, first published in 1885, is considered one of the earliest English-language examples of this type of post-apocalyptic science fiction. In the novel’s post-disaster England, civilization dissolves as nature reclaims the oncepopulated landscape. Perhaps the most widelyread apocalyptic writer is Nostradamus, whose collection of darkly prophetic quatrains has been inprint nearlycontinuouslysince hisdeathin1566. Our exhibition features a 1972 fine print edition of his text, showing its ongoing popularity.
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N E D E G N I D L BUI The materials in this case reflect early Utopian imaginings dating back to the 16th century, as well as descriptions of Utopian communities, both religious and secular. Thomas More’s Utopia and JamesHarrington’sOceanaareexcellentexamples of early European utopian thought, describing political philosophy and governmental design in great detail. In the centuries after the publication of More’s book,EuropeansimmigratedtotheUnitedStatesin vast numbers in search of a new society—a climate whichunsurprisinglyproducedinnumerable19th centurycommunalsettlementsbasedonreligious or philosophical beliefs.
Amana was a colony of seven villages in Iowa populated by German Pietists who operated an almost entirely self-sufficient economy for eighty years. WiththeriseoftheBacktotheLandmovement in the 1960s and 1970s, Americans experienced a renewedinterestinhistoricalintentionalcommunities,examiningtheirdesigns,structures,successes, and failures through a personal lens. While the popular vision of a modern counterculture communitybringstomindhomesteadingandrural social experiments, 1960s and 1970s intentional communities were as diverse as the social movements from which they stemmed. The Modern Utopianshowcasedthediversityofthesecommunes andtheirresidents;theselectioninthiscasefeatures a 15 Point Platform written by members of Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor.
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Although a vehicle isn’t always required (Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, for instance, is transported to the past via a blow to the head), a proper time machine is usually an important component of any good time travel narrative. And when we project ourselves into the future, vehicles seem to be one of the first things we want to imagine in detail. The connection between fantastic vehicles and time travel goes back at least to Montgolfier and the earliest balloons, and after the flights of
1783 speculative literature of the future increased dramatically. From carriages powered by the wind in1794topersonalrocketvehiclesin1860,immense ingenuity and imagination have been put at the service of inventing new ways of travel. Fantastical transportation was a regular feature of Popular Science Monthly in the early 20th century. Some designs were probably intended as humorous follies from the start; others, like the magneticallypowered train featured on the cover of a 1932 issue, resonate today, as we continue to seek out better ways to move ourselves around the country and the world.
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History seems like the most straightforward direction for time-traveling: We may get some of the details wrong or disagree about their interpretation, but we at least know what happened in the past. It seems like a place to which we can always return. This is a case about places you can’t go, and things you can’t see, about lost pasts and pasts that never happened. In some cases those places are inaccessible because they never existed. Middle Earth and the Island of California are geographic fictions, one a work of literature and the other a cartographic mistake. Modern cities evolve on a daily basis, for
the mechanics of time
better and worse, sometimes in a conscious and coordinated fashion and other times through natural evolution. Many elements of a 1961 proposal for the Providence of the future never came to pass, leaving instead an alternate universe in which a heliport figured prominently in the downtown cityscape. In other cases history writes a place out of existence:Though short-lived, the Confederate States ofAmericahadtheirowncurrency.Andtheprocess continues in our own time: Ancient Assyrian sites depicted by Austen Henry Layard in 1849 survived formillenniabeforefacingdestructionatthehands of ISIS militants within the last few years.
Einstein, Albert. Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie. Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosious Barth, 1916. Courtesy of The John Hay Library at Brown University. Gift of Daniel G. Siegel, Class of 1957. [Clock, Self Winding Clock Company,SecondaryElectric Clock Movement]. [circa 1910]. Courtesy of the Ladd Observatory. 1 Engler, Edmund A. “TimeKeeping in Paris.” The Popular Science Monthly, 20.10 (January 1882): 304-312. Louis Tannen’s Catalog of Magic, No. 2. [New York: Louis Tannen, 1955]. From the John H. Percival Collection of Books about Magic.
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2 (and cover) - “Guesses at Futurity”series. The Pall Mall Magazine, volumes IV-VI (1894-1895). On display in the Level 3 gallery cases. Hare, Elizabeth Sage and Warren Chappell.“TheWorld of Tomorrow, New York World’s Fair” [Tunnel Book]. [New York?]:n.p., [1939]. From the Edith Wetmore Collection of Children’s Literature. “Highways of the Future.” Popular Science Monthly, 132.5 (May, 1938): 27-29, 118-119. 3 “The House of Tomorrow.” [Postcard].(Chicago:Reuben H. Donnelley, 1933). Jane, Fred T. “Guesses at Futurity. No. 6. Interplanetary Communication.—The First Magnetiscope.” The Pall Mall Magazine, 5.23 (1895): opposite p. 503.
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4 Uzanne, Octave. “The End of Books.”Scribner’s Magazine, 16.2 (July, 1894): 221-231.
fearful futures 5 Astounding Stories, 17.4 (June, 1936). Jefferies, Richard. After London: Or, Wild England. London: Cassell & Co., 1885. Courtesy of the Providence Athenaeum. Lear, John. “Hiroshima, U.S.A.” Collier’s Magazine, 126.6(August5,1950):11-17. Nostradamus.Nostradamus: His Prophecies for the Future. White Plains, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1972. 6 Pennell, Joseph. “That Liberty Shall Not Perish from the Earth—Buy Liberty Bonds.” [1918]. From the Louis C. Huntoon Collection of World War I and II Posters. On display in the Level 3 gallery cases. Saturday Evening Post, 212.27 (December 30, 1939).
building eden Davis, Darrell H. “Amana: A Study of Occupance.” Economic Geography, 12.3 (July, 1936): 217-230. 7 Harrington, James. The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington Esq.; Collected, Methodiz’d, and Review’d, with an Exact Account of His Life Prefix’d, by John Toland. London: A. Millar, 1737. Mercier, Louis Sebastien. Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred… Translated from the French by W. Hooper, M.D. Dublin: W. Wilson, 1772. From the George W. Potter and Alfred M. Williams Memorial Collection on Irish Culture.
8 More, Thomas. A Most Pleasant, Fruitful, and Witty Work of the Best State of a Public Weal, and of the New Isle Called Utopia. London:William Miller, 1808. “Youth Liberation 15 Point Platform and Program.” Utopia, U.S.A. Special issue of The Modern Utopian (1972): 203-205.
time travel 9 Claudy, C.H. “The Motor Car of the Future.” Scientific American, 118.1 (January 5, 1918): 5,28. On display in the Level 3 gallery cases. 10 “Flying Machines in the Future” and “Flying Machines—A Bird-Woman.” The Scientific American, 3.11 n.s. (September 8, 1860): 165. “Freak Vehicles for Air, Land, and Water.” Popular Science Monthly, 123.3 (September, 1933): 26-27, 96. 11 Hooper, William. Rational Recreations: In Which the Principles of Numbers and Natural Philosophy Are Clearly and Copiously Elucidated, by a Series of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments. Among Which Are All Those Commonly Performed with the Cards. London: Printed for B. Law and Son, and G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794. Volume 1 of 4. From the John H. Percival Collection of Books about Magic. “New Patents Forecast Your 1942 Car.” Popular Science Monthly, 136.6 (June, 1940): 78-81, 225. 12 [Photograph of Man and Machine]. [no date]. From the Glass Plate Negative Collection (GN680051). Reproduced on the exhibition room walls. Popular Science Monthly, 121.1 (July, 1932).
alternate histories 13 [Currency, three pieces issued by the Confederate States of America - $10, $20, and$100].[1861,1862,1864]. From the Caleb Fiske Harris Collection on the Civil War and Slavery. Layard, Austen Henry. Nineveh and Its Remains: With an Account of a Visit to the Chaldæan Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devilworshippers; And an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians. New York: George P. Putnam, 1849.Volume 1 of 2. Providence City Plan Commission. Downtown Providence, 1970: A Demonstration of Citizen Participation in Comprehensive Planning. Providence: City Plan Commission, 1961. From the Rhode Island Collection. 14 Sanson, Nicolas. L’Amerique enplusieurscartesnouvelles et exactes, & en divers traictes de geographie et d’histoire: là où sont descrits succinctement, & avec vne belle methode & facile: ses empires, ses monarchies, ses estats, &c.: les moeurs, les langues, les religions, le negoce, et la richesse de ses peuples &c.: et ce qu’il y a de plus beau & de plus rare dans toutes ses parties & dans ses isles. Paris: Chez l’autheur, dans le cloistre de Sainct Germain l’Auxerrois joignant la grande Porte du Cloistre, 1662. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1937. From the Edith Wetmore Collection of Children’s Literature.
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Please feel free to take pictures of items in this exhibition (just turn off your flash) and share them on social media using the hashtag above. You can also view supplemental images, text, and video on your computer, mobile device, or the kiosk available in the exhibition room at:
http://portals.provlib.org/extras Special thanks to the Providence Athenaeum, the Ladd Observatory, and the John Hay Library at Brown University, who generously provided items from their collections for this exhibition.
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