Five minutes, 20 slides. What would you say?

At every Ignite, 16 artists, technologists, thinkers, and personalities will take the stage to answer this challenge.

Location:

Washington, D.C. 20001
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Ignite DC #5

Alex Herder

How We Thought It Would Happen: Prescient visions of the future from the Victorian past

People have always been fascinated by the future, but it wasn't until the industrial boom of the Victorian era that our anticipation of progress was met with the kind of exponential growth that we now take for granted. This talk will focus on what late 19th-century thinkers saw in their crystal balls and how, in a lot of cases, they were't too far off the mark. You will be amazed at how some technologies were anticipated and what others were way off the mark: Video conferencing, television, telephones, the internet, and of course, zeppelins.

About Alex Herder:

Alex Herder is co-owner and business director for The Duke & the Duck Productions, a startup animation company in Washington, DC. Before starting The Duke & the Duck, Alex oversaw online marketing at the socially-entrepreneurial international tech startup, Voxiva. His previous experience is as a failed Troma film maker, a TV script consultant and a student of History at the University of Illinois, where he founded a cooperative bike shop and edited weblog Duenos.net.