INTRODUCTORY
THE Comte de L’Isle-Adam was a man of great learning, a profound thinker, and a very interesting writer. He was a very great favorite with the French people of culture.
L’Eve future was one of his latest works, and at the time of its publication it was widely discussed among the scientists and other writers of the day, and was proclaimed by all to be a very remarkable work.
It was written just a few years before the author’s death, and published in Paris, in 1884.
Considered from our point of view, in the present day, the work is even more remarkable than when it was first published, since all of the devices, which he describes so accurately in this romance, have been fully developed, and are now used commercially in our every-day life, with the single exception of the Andriad, or mechanical being, and his scientific description of this creation is the nearest to the real thing that has yet been written, We now have in use, with apparatus almost precisely identical with his learned and prophetic description of them, the player-piano, the flaming arc lights, the refracting mirrors, the moving picture, the talking moving picture, the electrically controlled elevators, the pneumatic tubes for transporting messages, the wireless telegraph, the wireless telephone, the loud speaker, or amplifier, the various lighting effects, used in theaters, and the automatic receivers for the telegraph and wireless outfits.
Comte Villiers dse L’lsle-Adam died in 1889.