In December 1900, Ladies Home Journal made predictions about what would happen in the next one hundred years, based on interviews with experts in their respective fields. How do those guesses hold up to historical scrutiny?
The spot-on:
Telephones Around the World. 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. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girlâ€.
… Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted.
… 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. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.
The wrong:
Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today.… There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic.
… Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal.
The just plain confounding:
No Mosquitoes nor Flies. Insect screens will be unnecessary. Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated. Boards of health will have destroyed all mosquito haunts and breeding-grounds, drained all stagnant pools, filled in all swamp-lands, and chemically treated all still-water streams. The extermination of the horse and its stable will reduce the house-fly.… Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles.
… 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, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.
… Peas as Large as Beets.
… Strawberries as Large as Apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence. Raspberries and blackberries will be as large.
If there’s anything to learn from this, it’s that men of the past were convinced we’d all be eating giant fruits and vegetables by now.
