En L'An 2000: Eagle-Nest Robbers with Personal Flying Wings, c.1900
Startlingly prescient for its era, this French futurist card imagines personal human flight not via aircraft but strapped-on ornithopter wings, decades before hang gliders existed. Two young adventurers equipped with mechanical bird-wing harnesses raid an eagle's clifftop nest, as the enraged parent eagle attacks one of the intruders mid-air. Below the nest, eaglet chicks stretch upward. The chromolithographic palette — warm ochres, aqua skies, bold reds — gives the scene a storybook menace surprisingly charged with genuine aeronautical speculation.
Robbing an eagle's nest with jury-rigged bird-wing backpacks is exactly the kind of Saturday afternoon plan that ends badly, and indeed it already has for one of the boys. Points deducted because the children seem only mildly alarmed.
“EN L'AN 2000 The Little Eagle-Nest Robbers”
