elfs | The future through the past (Reply)

Sometimes, the future comes before the present. Take, for example, this list of predictions about the year 2000, as presented in the December 1900 edition of The Ladies Home Journal. Some of my favorites:

#3: Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.

The last bit is true, but it carries absolutely no social opprobrium. People feel free to be weaklings, and how dare anyone look down on them for being incapable of moving about without their motorized scooter.

#11 & #28: Mosquitos, flies, rats and mice will be exterminated. The horse will be practically extinct, and no wild animals will exist outside of menageries. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected. 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.

The bit about food animals becoming even more like food and less like animals is coming true, but anyone who thought that flies, mosquitos, mice and rats would be extinct was fatally unfamiliar with these beasts. And sadly, they may be right about the wild animals as well.

#23: Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons. The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed. Such wholesale cookery will be done in electric laboratories rather than in kitchens. These laboratories will be equipped with electric stoves, and all sorts of electric devices, such as coffee-grinders, egg-beaters, stirrers, shakers, parers, meat-choppers, meat-saws, potato-mashers, lemon-squeezers, dish-washers, dish-dryers and the like. All such utensils will be washed in chemicals fatal to disease microbes. Having one's own cook and purchasing one's own food will be an extravagance.

I love the description of the busy mom getting a rack of clean, generic dishware from the Central Repository in the morning, and dumping them all on the doorstep at night. The writer clearly didn't work hard at envisioning the massive human effort this would entail, nor did he imagine (few did) that mass production would also lead to mass customization and feed into the human desire to differentiate and express one's individuality, even if only in the design one chooses for one's own dishware.

My favorite, though, is this one:

#15: No Foods will be Exposed. Storekeepers who expose food to air breathed out by patrons or to the atmosphere of the busy streets will be arrested with those who sell stale or adulterated produce.

At the time, this almost seemed sensible. Germ theory had just taken off in America (as it had not in Europe; Americans, it seems, were prime material for absorbing the idea that there were invisible things that could kill you, while Europe was more "pragmatic" and dismissed such notions as nonsense. One famous European surgeon went so far as to claim that if he washed his hands before surgery his peers would accuse him of "witch doctoring") and canning and vacuum processing had become all the rage, allowing food to last much, much longer than it had previously. What we know now is that both the flavor and the nutritional value of such food is compromised, but it's one of those "look back in laughter" moments that reveals much more about the time in which it was written than our time does now.