If only we could predict the future…accurately

 

A strange and quite amusing prediction of the future; taken in 1966, the large box-type thing, which resembles a Canon C5051 photocopier, is meant to be a robot in 1976

It has always been of great interest to predict the future, imagining a range of exciting new products, activities and things that will improve our quality of life. In 1900 American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions for what he thought life would be like in a 100 years’ time. In an article named ‘What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years’ he mentioned a number of things that he thought would be possible by the year 2000. Most, but not all of his predictions came true. He was right about the following things though:

• "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."

Obviously he’s trying to describe what most people would simply refer to as a ‘mobile phone’ These days it is easy to take such technologies for granted, but before mobiles it was impossible to communicate with people as easily as today.



'Mobira Talkman', one of the first 'mobile' phones, 80% of the phone is just battery...



•  "Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today."

Basically, microwavable meals.

• "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."
• "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."

The Internet does this, blogging, YouTube and the rise in citizen journalism all contribute towards this happening. ‘…Photographs will reproduce all of natures’s colours’– lol


And these are some of his predictions which didn’t come true…

• "Everybody will walk 10 miles a day."

That’s a little too much to ask for, what would be the point of walking such distances if, as he predicted, there would be, “Huge forts on wheels [which] will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of today”?

• "Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been exterminated."

As far as I am aware mosquitoes still exist, and so does malaria. House flies and roaches are still in existence.

• "There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary."

Strictly speaking, this is not true, however with a rise in so called ‘text speak’ it could be argued that certain letters have become unnecessary. Txt msgs dnt hv all d lettrz tht ther supposed 2 hv.

Tomorrow I shall post my own predictions for the next 100 years.



The film I, Robot (2004) shows a more realistic idea of robots in the future