The "limited" creativity of its creator is very clear. He/She seems to be obsessed with either going in the air or going under water. I wonder whether this creativity was truly individual, and would a collective creativity been able to fathom the future to a better degree.
You can look at Jules Verne, who did also write about means of travel. And the most important visible innovations from that time are usually related to transportation. So I believe collectively transportation was the technology which captured imagination at that time.
Atop of this, it is really hard to sell postcards in which the bastard offspring of looms rule the world.
