Albert Robida’s Novel vs. 1956: Strict 3/9, Lenient 6/9

How was the book split into items?

An item is a technology, a public service, or a social or political arrangement that the narrator presents as an ordinary part of France or Europe in December 1955 and 1956. The items come from the features named in the chapter summaries of the book’s own table of contents, and from the ways of travelling and talking at a distance shown in use in the first three chapters. A further item was added when a passage stated a separate fact that could be checked, such as how long women had held the vote.

Jokes are set aside. Electric storms that escape from power reservoirs and kill people on the telephone, a parliamentary party for men, and a compulsory national medicine are played for laughs, so they are not scored as misses. Plot events, invented people and firms, and things already in use when the book appeared, such as the telephone and the phonograph, are left out too. The list of 27 items was fixed on November 6, 2026, before any item was graded.

The split rules and the passages set aside, with reasons (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Albert Robida, La Vie électrique, and the sources named in each row

Illustration

An illustration of an imagined scene, not a plate from the book: an electric city of December 1955 as a novel of the 1890s pictured it, with air cabs over the rooftops. Robida’s own drawings are not shown on this page.

The ledger

Each item was checked against records from the mid-1950s or later accounts of that period. A United Nations statistical yearbook for 1956 (Exhibit G) and a United Nations yearbook on human rights for 1946 (Exhibit B) settle most of the scorable items. Single sources settle the rest: an engineering journal on video telephones (Exhibit C), a government survey of weather control (Exhibit D) and an account of war inventions from 1918 (Exhibit E).

Grade counts for the 27 items, with the strict and lenient rates over the 9 scorable items. Drawn from the item table published with this page.

The 27 items, with deadlines, tests, grades, reasons and sources (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: Albert Robida, La Vie électrique, and the sources named in each row

By the strict count, 3 of the 9 scorable items are hits, or 33%. The lenient count adds the three partial hits: 6 of 9 hold up, or 67%. Items 8 and 9 were first graded hits and were regraded on November 6, 2026; their earlier grades stay in the previous_grade column of the download.

Eighteen items are left out of both counts. Several of them, such as air cabs, passenger tubes and meals sent by pipe, look as if they would fail, but no source read for this page measures them, so the two rates describe nine items and not the whole book.

What came true?

The three hits concern war and the vote. In the army manoeuvres of 1956, air forces mobilise beside land and undersea forces, and chemical troops carry asphyxiating gas. Both had arrived by 1918: Corbin describes aeroplanes scouting, fighting and bombing, and a German attack with chlorine gas on Canadian troops (Exhibit E). The book’s women vote and sit in elected office, and French women gained the right to vote and to stand for election by an ordinance of April 21, 1944 (Exhibit B, p. 112).

Three items count only as partial hits. Over the book’s Paris, express air lines arrive from the provinces and abroad, and a giant airliner comes in from South America. In 1955 scheduled airlines outside mainland China and the USSR flew about 61.1 billion passenger-kilometres on domestic and international services (Exhibit G, Table 143). The scheduled lines came true, but that table does not show how often they linked Europe’s cities or whether airliners arrived from other continents.

Radio sets in use in Europe outside the USSR in 1955 (a UNESCO estimate), against television licences in France in April 1956, each per 1,000 people; the licences are set against the 1954 census population. Drawn from the UN Statistical Yearbook 1956 (Exhibit G), Tables 1, 185 and 187.

Robida’s Telejournal reads the news aloud at breakfast. By a UNESCO estimate, about 78 million radio sets were in use in Europe outside the USSR in 1955, 190 for every 1,000 people (Exhibit G, Table 185). That table counts sets, not news programmes. The receiver at home came true; no source read for this page shows the news part.

Television is the third. Plays, concerts and news pictures do reach screens at home in the book, and even a modest civil servant’s family in the Alps has one. France had issued 314,000 television licences by April 1956, about 7 for every 1,000 people at the 1954 census count of 42,843,520 (Exhibit G, Tables 1 and 187). Broadcast pictures came true; the screen in every home did not.

What missed, and what can’t be scored?

The picture telephone missed. Two-way video calls were shown between two New York buildings in 1930, but the Bell System’s own account says practical service depended on technology developed mainly in the 1960s (Exhibit C). Weather control missed as well. A survey written after a federal advisory committee reported in December 1957 found that seeding clouds could add a little local rain, and concluded: “In general, the present known capabilities for controlling the weather are quite modest.” (Exhibit D, first page)

Dates behind the misses, 1883 to 1971, with the story’s own years marked. Drawn from Exhibits A to D and H; the 1893 date is the catalogue date of the Getty Research Institute copy.

The third miss comes from the book’s own detail. Its women hold office as “électrice, éligible, ayant les mêmes droits politiques et sociaux que l’homme depuis plus de trente ans” (“voters and eligible for office, with the same political and social rights as men for more than thirty years”, translated by Hoax and Hindsight; Exhibit A, pt. 2, ch. II, p. 136).

That would date the rights to before about 1925. In France they dated from 1944, and the laws of the Third Republic had not given women equal political rights (Exhibit B, p. 112).

Eighteen items could not be scored. Two are too loosely worded to test: nervous exhaustion across a whole population, and moving pictures taking the place of painting. For the other 16, among them air cabs, tube trains, shopping by screen and a national park closed to industry, no source read for this page settles the test. They are left out of both rates rather than counted as misses.

Why did the 1890s fear the pace of electric life?

One item can be read as a dated fear. In the book, the hurried electric life of the title has worn people out, and each summer crowds of the exhausted flee to the Brittany park, where machines are banned (Exhibit A, pt. 1, ch. VI; pt. 2, ch. II and VIII).

The same fear was in print within a few years of the book. Max Nordau’s Degeneration first appeared in English in London in February 1895. It blamed railways, letters and newspapers for the strain and wrote: “All these activities, however, even the simplest, involve an effort of the nervous system and a wearing of tissue.” (Exhibit F, Book I, ch. IV)

Illustration

An illustration of an imagined scene, not a plate from the book: the weariness of electric life as the 1890s feared it, a man worn out under bare lamps among letters and papers.

Because the book and a source from its own years both show this fear, item 17 fits the time-stamped wish. The item itself stays unscored, since the book names no measure by which exhaustion across a nation could be checked. For the other items, no period source on their hopes or fears was read for this page, so they are scored and nothing more is read into them.