Many very close to reality.

Hundred-year-old predictions (mostly) came true

Who could have ever predicted in the year 1900 that the age of telegrams would morph into texts, tweets and 24-hour news channels?

American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins imagined it. In an article he wrote for Ladies' Home [i]Jo[/i]urnal, entitled "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years," Watkins laid out a vision for the future that is now regarded as amazingly accurate.

Of the 25 or so predictions made in that article 112 years ago, a surprising number of them were more or less bang on. Ladies Home Journal recently re-posted Watkins' paper on its website. Here's a look at what he got right, mostly right and just plain wrong.

Right

• Digital photography - Watkins accurately predicted the age of digital, full-colour photos that could be eamiled or loaded onto breaking news websites when he wrote: "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 newspapers an hour later.... photographs will reproduce all of nature's colours."
• Mobile phones - Watkins seems to have foreseen the age of emails and cellphones when he wrote: "Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. 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."
• Year-round produce - Strawberries in January seem commonplace for us now, but many of Watkins' peers likely found these words crazy when he wrote them in 1900:  "Fast-flying refrigerators on land and sea will bring delicious fruits from the tropics and southern temperate zone within a few days. The farmers of South America… whose seasons are directly opposite to ours, will thus supply us in winter with fresh summer foods which cannot be grown here."
• Pre-cooked meals - "Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishment similar to our bakeries of today," Watkins accurately predicted.
• Americans will get taller –"Americans will be taller by from one to two inches." Watkins got this one pretty much spot on. The average height of Americans in 1900 was 67 inches; today, it's 69 inches.
• Tanks – Watkins correctly imagined how wars would be fought when he wrote: "huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of today."
• Television - "Man will see around the world. 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 a span." Again, ideas that must have seemed crazy at the time. But now we might ask: was this TV that Watkins predicted… or Google Street View?
• Air conditioning and central heating – "Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house," Watkins correctly predicted, though we've replaced "spigots" with digital thermostats.

Mostly right

• High speed rail - "Express trains (will run at) one hundred and fifty miles per hour." Most trains in the U.S. don't travel this fast, but in Europe and Asia, high speed trains can go as fast as 300 miles an hour.
• Population growth – "There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America." Not quite, but pretty close. The U.S. population hit 280 million by 2001; it's estimated at 307 million now. But then, Watkins' estimate took into account his prediction that both Nicaragua and Mexico would become part of the United States.
• "There will be no cars in our large cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground." - We do have subways, underground pathways and moving sidewalks in places. But we're a long way from giving up our love of the automobile or from the mostly quiet cities that Watkins imagined.

Wrong

• "Everybody will be able to walk 10 miles a day" - Not much could be further from that truth, as we're more sedentary than ever. On the other hand, athletes continue to make big performance improvements, running faster and jumping higher than ever before.
• "A university education will be free to every man and woman." – Hardly. The cost of university tuition has only risen, to the point that many in America and elsewhere take on debt to achieve a higher education.
• "No mosquitoes nor flies. Insect screens will be unnecessary." - A nice idea, but such a prospect is not only unlikely but unwise, since the planet's ecosystem would likely fall apart without flies, annoying as they may be.
• "Strawberries as large as apples and peas as large as beets" – Portion size have grown in the last century, but actual fruits and veggies? Not by quite as much.
• "There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted." Why Watkins hoped this would happen isn't clear. But it definitely didn't happen.

LINK

"Spelling by sound will have been adopted."

sumbuddy shooda tode that to sum rednex I no.

Interesting article.  I sure wish he'd been correct on the mosquitoes ... we sure have some huge ones here in the Ozarks.  I hardly go outside at night since moving back here.

I remember once - driving through Manitoba at night - in the middle of the summer - I really thought it was snowing but the smear on my windshield was goopy and green.

Mosquitoes.... I have never in my life seen so many mosquitoes.

i lik fonetek speleng

"There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted." Why Watkins hoped this would happen isn't clear. But it definitely didn't happen.

It had already started in 1900.
Consifer USians omitting the "u" in behaviour or the word thruinstead of through. The language will change even more quickly with tweets, twits, email and all the other electronic media.

r u shur?

Gognm chme ru nadxog.

Sid, are you sure the goopy green stuff wasn't from those peas as big as beets that someone predicted? Who would want a pea as big as a beet?