1918 science Magazine - the distances of space graphic

Very steampunk!

Of 2 miles a minute.... why that's like 120 mph!

The crafts rock too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_airspeed_record

And in a steam-driven car in 1906, and a (petrol-driven) motorcycle in 1907: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Steamer

You'd think they'd have been a little more ambitious in their speeds.

The war aside, most of the world of 1918 wouldn't be too unfamiliar to someone from 1818, and someone from 1718 would be able to get the gist of things after adjusting for the effects of steam power and other such things. They would've seen a relatively stable progress in technology (again, the war notwithstanding) and would still be thinking in really incremental terms.

They probably were deliberately lowballing it, but would probably still be amazed at the idea of manned craft moving at 400 miles per hour, never mind the 20,000 that a space shuttle could pull off, or the five times that Galileo was doing at one point in its trip. Those would probably sound to people at the time the same way that talk of thousand-mile-an-hour passenger cars would today.

Steam and electric locomotives
steam ships
Mass produced steel
dynamos and electric motors
the electrical distribution system
electric lighting
the telegraph
the telephone
sound recording
radio
the internal combustion engine
the airplane
mechanical refrigeration

There was little invented in the First World War - tanks, chemical warfare. If you look at the list of air speed records, it looks like the war was a brake on it - from 1910 to 1914, the record went from 66mph to 134mph; by 1918, they'd got, unofficially, to 163mph.

A 'science' magazine should have been used to rapid technological change after all that.