Diving into the past of the future

This is a Carmagnolle diving suit made in France in 1880. It sits, unused, in the Navy museum in Paris. Compare this suit with current ones made of spandex or Lycra which work as a second skin and it becomes clear that the evolution of a useful design has to do with the evolution of its components and materials. We have always had the same ideas and desires: to fly, to dive, to communicate remotely... just that the state of technology hasn't always been the right one to make them realize at their full potential.
There is nothing ever new but hardly old things become updated, refashioned. It is rather a matter of naming. For example, the functional quality of "paper" doesn't belong to the paper itself but to many other different things like, let's say, the ipad. What "dies" or gets replaced is just the name of the thing, but not its function. We can say "paper" is dying but in fact it is the word that may be going out of fashion. Its functionality just gets remediated into another technological device made of a different material that serves for the same purpose.