The future through the past

[elfs]

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.

Comments

I dunno, seems pretty good for a 100-year view

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Insects aren't extinct, and it was overoptimistic to suppose they might be, but mosquitos have become very rare in developed areas-- even in South Florida, as you may recall. That used to be a dangerous place to live because of mosquito-borne diseases. Mice and rats ARE gone from most people's lives.

I thought #23 was right on, except for the dishes-- the writer didn't anticipate the advent of disposable dishes and utensils. That first sentence sounds just like Judge Doom's line about "restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food" in Roger Rabbit. Oh, the pneumatic tubes may sound silly, but that technology was in wide use when that article was written:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube

As for #15, well, that's right on the money except for foods that have natural packaging (skins, rinds, etc.). In the 19th Century, meat was not packaged for display at butcher shops. It just sat on shelves or hung on hooks, sometimes out in front of the shop, and was only packaged to be taken home. Try to find anything like that in a supermarket today. Essentially all supermarket food is sealed.

I was curious enough to go read the original article (since I'm kind of at loose ends while my work computer waits to be repaired).

#1: The population estimate was only about 18% high. Instead of Nicaragua and Mexico joining the Union, we got Hawaii and Alaska.

#2: Mostly correct.

#3: The writer correctly predicted the fitness craze, but overestimated how broadly it would be accepted.

#4: Pretty much a clear miss.

#5: A lot of solid hits in this one, but the writer couldn't anticipate how air travel would undermine the railways.

#6: Right on, except the writer misunderstood the value of higher-power internal-combustion engines.

#7: Clean miss. Airships (zeppelins) weren't the answer.

#8: Mostly wrong. The writer should have understood that long-range artillery can be adapted for anti-airship use, making military attack airships impractical.

#9: True, but the writer doesn't deserve much credit for this one, since the fax machine predates the telephone.

#10: So accurate it made me suspect the piece was a hoax! I don't know what technology would have been visible to someone in 1900 that would have led to this prediction, except possibly the fax machine. But some research online seems to confirm that this is a legitimate article.

#11: Mosquitos and flies, mostly correct.

#12: Mostly wrong, though sugar cane was briefly the primary supply of sugar in the US (I think it's sugar beets again now, since they cost less to grow).

#13: Almost all wrong, though seedless fruits of some kinds are common.

#14: Almost all wrong.

#15: Exposed food, mostly correct. But we don't use liquid-nitrogen freezers.

#16: Wrong. Arguably silly.

#17: Some good hits, some clean misses. It must have been very brave to advocate universal free access to college. That one turns out to be accurate but misguided. Maybe in the next hundred years we'll figure out how to give each person the right amount and kind of education.

#18: Accurate, but also an easy one.

#19: The technology was wrong but the result was correct.

#20: The estimate of the world coal reserves was startlingly accurate but waterpower was not the panacea he predicted.

#21: Wrong, and engineers of the time could have told him that.

#22: Pneumatic tubes, discussed above.

#23: Food, as above. I'll add that it was fairly wise to predict the demise of cooks as servants.

#24: Partly right, partly wrong.

#25: Almost right-- fast transportation made Southern Hemisphere food so accessible to North America that there was no need to grow oranges near Philadelphia.

#26: This is a copy of #13, suggesting a huge error in transcription.

#27: Mostly wrong. Also, medical fluoroscopy predate this article.

#28: Mostly wrong or trivial. Food animals were being adapted into better food producers long before this article was written.

#29: The hydrofoil was invented around the same time as this article was written, so this may not be as prescient as it appears. In any event, hydrofoil submarines never appeared.

All in all, a very interesting piece. Thanks for linking to it.

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Re: I dunno, seems pretty good for a 100-year view

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

They really had a hard-on for that new-fangled electricity. It could do EVERYTHING! from helping plants grow to making pharmaceuticals more effective. wow.

It's surprising how dead on some of the predictions were,like #25, discounting the Philadelphia references, and the second half of #27, though with magnetic fields instead of light.

Re: I dunno, seems pretty good for a 100-year view

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

#8: Mostly wrong. The writer should have understood that long-range artillery can be adapted for anti-airship use, making military attack airships impractical.

Actually, there's a lot more right there than wrong. Giant guns came and went, discarded for lack of flexibility, even the 'Atomic Cannon'. Batteries are aimed with the aid of GPS units or inertial navigation systems, and airborne FLIR and laser-designation systems. The 'dense, smoky mists' are another case of been and gone with the mass deployment of Window over Germany during WWII; more modern stealth designs cloak themselves directly. And precision-guided munitions, while not in detail being 'deadly thunderbolts', provide a decent enough imitation. The 'great steel plates' is another 'came and went' idea; the immensely-armored fortresses of Nazi Germany served only to prove that a sword can be built to penetrate almost any shield. 'Huge forts on wheels', well, look at a modern main battle tank, and compare it to the vehicles of 1900; some can get up to the speed trains were capable of back then, and the tactics of mechanized warfare look much like cavalry maneuvers. Trenching vehicles were superseded by the death of trench warfare, killed by the 'huge forts on wheels', but entrenching vehicles survive for civil engineering and for specialized military tasks like minelaying. Silent rifles, well, that's a fundamental limitation of supersonic projectiles. Submarine boats is a dead hit; one fast-attack boat with a nuclear-tipped Harpoon in a VLS cell can take out a fleet. Reconnaissance planes can produce that quality of photograph; satellites can almost duplicate it.

#29? Hybrid hydrofoil-submarines were patented twice -- patent nos. 4,819,576 and 5,503,100, and Konstantin Matveev built a functioning one for the movie 'xXx'. Of course, the spread of commercial aviation pretty well killed development of high-speed cargo ships, so that's a lose for the prediction.

Re: I dunno, seems pretty good for a 100-year view

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

That's cool, thanks for the info!

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Re: I dunno, seems pretty good for a 100-year view

[gromm.livejournal.com]

#21: Wrong, and engineers of the time could have told him that.

Well, *I* don't have a chimney. And while the city-wide centralized nature of heating and cooling is wrong, he described modern HVAC systems pretty accurately. Just on a larger scale than is practical.

Re: I dunno, seems pretty good for a 100-year view

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

The original prediction:

Prediction #21: Hot and Cold Air from Spigots. Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house as we now turn on hot or cold water from spigots to regulate the temperature of the bath. Central plants will supply this cool air and heat to city houses in the same way as now our gas or electricity is furnished. Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times. Homes will have no chimneys, because no smoke will be created within their walls.

Okay, we don't use "spigots" or anything providing a continuous supply of both hot and cold air.

The central-plant idea was wrong because it's thermodynamically impractical. Even on large commercial or academic campuses and within large buildings, central heating and cooling use an intermediate working fluid such as steam or cold water, which is distributed to interchangers at the point of use.

It's true that nobody has to get up early to feed the furnace, but that's because we use gas, oil, or electricity. If your place doesn't have a chimney, it must be using electricity. But any gas- or oil-fired furnace certainly does have a chimney.

Come to think of it, I'm surprised the writer didn't just predict that electricity would be used for heating. Possibly with powerful colored lights, or by running electricity directly through the body so the whole room doesn't have to be heated. :-)

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