In 1910, a French illustrator named Villemard took a crack at predicting what the year 2000 would be like, and he came up with some wild, wild stuff.

Some of these illustrations seem completely nutty, like pumping books directly into our brains and policemen and firemen in flying bat suits. Some of the stuff is just downright dangerous, like fireplaces filled with radium. And some of the stuff is in our near future, like robots that build structures. Yeah, most of it definitely trends towards the bizarre, but look at it from the other direction: what kinds of predictions would you make for the year 2100?

We've got the coolest 18 retrofuturistic images for you in the gallery below, and there's a bunch more at the source link.

Flickr, via Gizmodo