Last night, as I was listening to the thumpety-thump of distant Bluesfest, the concert halfway across town, I was reminded of this passage from Jules Verne’s posthumously published Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863:
As he walked on, silence and abandonment were reborn around him. Yet far in the distance he saw what looked like a tremendous light; he heard a great noise that sounded like nothing he knew. Nonetheless he continued, finally arriving in the center of a deafening racket, an enormous arena which could easily hold some ten thousand persons, and on the pediment of the building was written in fiery letters:
ELECTRIC CONCERT
Yes, electric concert, and what instruments! According to a Hungarian method, two hundred pianos wired together by means of an electric current could be played by the hands of a single artist! One piano with the power of two hundred!
Illustration by ChatGPT
This passage appears near the end of the book, when our now homeless protagonist aimlessly wonders a futuristic city. I am deeply fascinated by how well Verne predicted, no, not the technical details of mechanical amplification, but the social phenomenon: mass cultural events that become oddly alienating and impersonal, a cacophony of light and noise that, from a distance, often feels more hostile than inviting.