En L'An 2000: Radium Heating, French Futurist Postcard c.1900

Part of the celebrated 'En L'An 2000' series conceived by artist Jean-Marc Côté and others for the 1900 Paris Exposition, this chromolithograph imagines a bourgeois drawing room of the year 2000 heated entirely by radium — then a sensational new discovery by Marie Curie. Elegantly dressed Edwardian socialites take tea beside a glowing radium fireplace, blissfully unaware of radiation's dangers. The scene is deceptively domestic, masking a bold techno-optimist vision of atomic-age comfort decades before the Atomic Age arrived.