Albert Robida's Electric Airship — La Vie Électrique, 1890
Created in the 1880s-1890s as Jules Verne's extraordinary voyages were reshaping public imagination, this pen-and-ink illustration by Albert Robida depicts a massive cigar-shaped electric airship complete with observation decks, passenger saloons with arched windows, rotating screw propellers, and two large conical landing stabilizers. Figures wave from rooftop balconies as crowds gather below. It appeared in Robida's prophetic novel 'La Vie Électrique,' a visionary satire of electrified 20th-century life that rivals Verne in ambition and surpasses him in visual wit.
A gleefully overcrowded airship bristling with turrets, spiral staircases, gothic windows, and cone-skirts defies all aerodynamic logic with magnificent Victorian confidence. Robida's design philosophy appears to be 'why have one impossible feature when you can have twelve?'
“Robida”
