100 year old technology predictions come true
Analysts have a hard enough time predicting what will happen in a year. Yet an engineer in 1900 made predictions that have become reality. Yes you got that right, it’s been 111 years! An engineer in 1900, John Elfreth Watkins Jr. made what now seem eery predictions of what would happen in 100 years. At the time he wrote the article for Ladies’ Home Journal which was titled “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”. The majority of his predictions have panned out now over 100 years later and I’m betting alot of companies wished they had him on their payroll right about now. There were a few that didn’t quite happen, but for the time period the fact that he got any right is itself an awesome track record. You can see the article as covered by Yahoo News here, my wife caught a glimps of it on the homepage and showed me. We were both astounded as we read it and I must credit my wife with the find.
A history editor for the Saturday Evening Post, a sister publication of the Ladies’ Home Journal dug out the article to see how Watkins did after 111 years have passed. We get to the part you’ve actually been waiting to read but funny enough Watkins started the article by saying,
These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America.
and proceeded to predict things that today we take for granted and are not a slight stretch of the imagination. The article had 28 predictions, if you want to see them click the link to the Saturday Evening Post above, here are a few of the more interesting predictions.
Correct
Digital color photography – Although he had no idea how it would happen he wrote about color pictures that would be able to move around the world in minutes. “Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspaper an hour later…photographs will reproduce all of nature’s colours.”
Mobile Phones – He wrote about our now loved mobile phones, beleiving wireless telephone circuits would span the world. This was 15 years before the first transcontinental call had been made. “A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.”
Pre-packaged meals – He predicted our now common ready to eat meals saying they would be sold in places similar to bakeries and thought the food would be made in laboratories instead of kitchens. “They (the store) will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking.”
Television – The great living room box, waster of time, melter of minds, he saw cameras and screens connect by electric circuits that would allow people all over the world to see events happening all over. “Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at span.”
Wrong
Free University - He thought that people would be able to get a university education for free, sadly this is not one of the predictions to have become true yet. “A university education will be free to every man and woman.”
Fitness - He thought that fitness would be a regular part of life and people would be in great physical condition. We all know this is not the case with most of the population, especially in North America currently. “Everybody will walk ten miles…A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.”
Pests - He thought common household pests like Cockroaches and Mosquitos would be eradicated due to their breeding grounds being eliminated. “Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated.”
Alphabet - He thought that letters not heavily used in the alphabet would eventually become un-necessary and disappear from the alphabet. Instead spelling by sound would be adopted, hmmm wonder if you could argue this as a prediction of Twitter?? “There will be no C, X, or Q in our every-day alphabet.”
OK so is anyone else’s mind blown right now? If you found this post fascinating, hilarious, incredible you must go to the Saturday Evening Post and read about all the other predictions. It is amazing to try and put yourself in 1900 and to think what images Mr. Watkins Jr. saw swimming through his mind.
