Wow! An outstanding piece, even for McCay standards! This was first published in the New York Herald on Nov.6, 1904, as part of a series of about 15 science-fiction short stories by John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922), built around visions seen through the “Spectrophone,” an instrument which enables one to see far into the future and annihilates space. Winsor McCay (who, ironically, embraced new technologies for reproducing his art and producing his animated cartoons) privately distrusted modern technology. It is hard to believe that visions like this were conceived by a man who grew up in an isolated lumbering town, didn’t receive more than two or three years of school education, and had never seen a street car nor an electric light prior to his fifteenth birthday...