Predictions of the Year 2000 from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900

I was surfing the interwebs and came across this little jewel. Now some of their predictions were pretty normal. Some however are pretty interesting. I'll let you read them and wait for some replies before posting my own observations. How close did they get?

This could get interesting.

Predictions of the Year 2000
from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900

The Ladies Home Journal from December 1900, which contained a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”.

Mr. Watkins wrote: “These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.”

During the Year 2000, we included Mr. Watkins research in our feature articles. We invite you to comment on these predictions, whether they have been realized in some way or how they can never be accomplished! In any event, we know you’ll enjoy these entries.

Some of the " prophecies" were close, a lil too close, .... however they gave us a little too much credit, as well as not taking into account how impractical some of their ideas were.

an interesting read, .... I can't believe the lifespan of that time was 35 years !!! it has almost tripled.

reply to post by IntastellaBurst


Yeah that one caught my eye as well. There are some others. I'm waiting to see what others come up in addition to yours before I add my own..

Thanks.

reply to post by SLAYER69


Wow!
Some of those are way out there....

Cool. Some things are spot on. Some,ehh,well - he was obviously not a military expert. My guess that he did what modern futurists do, and he got the same results.
Actually i found J.Efreth Watkins , not junior though, and he clearly understood more about ground transportation then about air ships.
Edit:
No , it is not him. Juinor part was important. "Our" Elfreth was a journalist.

[edit on 14-9-2009 by ZeroKnowledge]

That is a very cool article you posted.
They are touch and go tho...some things happened like the photograph stuff and some were way off the mark as they had no idea the greed we will be dealing with here.
Very cool. Star and flag from me for sure.

The ones about telephones and people being able to see what's happening around the world were almost 100% right.

I went through the list and made note of those predictions that I considered were bang on the money. In all, I counted 8 out of 29 - that's only 27.5%! Completely random coin tosses should give you at least 50%, so even though some of these were accurate, I have to say I am far from impressed. These tend to be more like “assumptions” rather than “predictions”.

rediction #5: Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express. There will be cigar-shaped electric locomotives hauling long trains of cars. Cars will, like houses, be artificially cooled. Along the railroads there will be no smoke, no cinders, because coal will neither be carried nor burned. There will be no stops for water. Passengers will travel through hot or dusty country regions with windows down.

Prediction #9: 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.

Prediction #10: 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.

Prediction #18: 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 girl”.

Prediction #19: Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box. Automatic instruments reproducing original airs exactly will bring the best music to the families of the untalented. Great musicians gathered in one enclosure in New York will, by manipulating electric keys, produce at the same time music from instruments arranged in theatres or halls in San Francisco or New Orleans, for instance. Thus will great bands and orchestras give long-distance concerts. In great cities there will be public opera-houses whose singers and musicians are paid from funds endowed by philanthropists and by the government. The piano will be capable of changing its tone from cheerful to sad. Many devises will add to the emotional effect of music.

Prediction #20: Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth’s hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300... Prediction

#23: Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today.

Prediction #24: Vegetables Grown by Electricity. Winter will be turned into summer and night into day by the farmer. In cold weather he will place heat-conducting electric wires under the soil of his garden and thus warm his growing plants. He will also grow large gardens under glass. At night his vegetables will be bathed in powerful electric light, serving, like sunlight, to hasten their growth. Electric currents applied to the soil will make valuable plants grow larger and faster, and will kill troublesome weeds. Rays of colored light will hasten the growth of many plants. Electricity applied to garden seeds will make them sprout and develop unusually early.

What have they predicted for the year 2100?

I notice that while they touched on advanced weapons and war machines, I think it is safe to say that they never even imagined the outcome of the Manhattan Project.

Regardless, some of these are interesting. They are eerily close to exact which is what is strange to me, while others are pretty good - just that technology went way to fast.

[edit on 14-9-2009 by gwydionblack]

Fascinating read Slayer, thanks for posting it! Amazingly prescient
while a few were ridiculous but no more than the others were at the
time he made these prognostications. Flying refrigerators! some
made me laugh while still being true. i doubt we could look forward another hundred years and do as well as he did. Do we dare try?
Anyone want to start that thread?
Starred , flagged and tagged - neat find!

Prediction #16: 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.

Although this did not happened in 2000, it could very well happen in the near future. In fact it is already happening to some extent. Not by the newspapers, but by the youth and cell phones.

have u red a txt snt by a teen?

Originally posted by WorldObserver
I went through the list and made note of those predictions that I considered were bang on the money. In all, I counted 8 out of 29 - that's only 27.5%! Completely random coin tosses should give you at least 50%, so even though some of these were accurate, I have to say I am far from impressed. These tend to be more like “assumptions” rather than “predictions”.

All predictions made by futurists are nothing more than educated guesses. What is amazing is how close they get. I count 21 that are close enough to be recognizable. #13 and #26 are duplicates.

Seems like he got pretty close on transportation and war machines. It even predicts stealth technology, although in the form of a mist, instead of radar absorbant materials and ECM. His description of tanks is odd, but fits.

grr.... pouble dost!

[edit on 9-14-2009 by rogerstigers]

Very interesting thread, alot of the predictions were right on, while

others were not, what caught my eye was the fact that life was it

seems was to become healthier, longer life expectancy, more

exercise, but pharma got really greedy, as far as there were to

be "few" swallowed drugs!! ...tis became a soft kill....imo.

Great find S&F, Thanks for posting.

Hey thanks everybody...

I'm going to let this run a tad bit longer...

Originally posted by IntastellaBurst


Some of the " prophecies" were close, a lil too close, .... however they gave us a little too much credit, as well as not taking into account how impractical some of their ideas were.

an interesting read, .... I can't believe the lifespan of that time was 35 years !!! it has almost tripled.

The fact of the matter is that people have always been able to life to 70,80,90,100 or more. But when considering a society as a whole the average plummets.

In 1900, the infant mortality rate was extremely high in comparison to today. As well as other diseases which had not been cured or dealt with, not to mention all the deaths attributed directly to malnutrition.

As soon as all of these issues were are today, easy to deal with, were solved, the average lifespan had no choice but to rise.

But to believe that noone lived past 40, 100 years ago is wrong.

That was a great read! Thank you!

It interesting to see the correlations between how they imagined the future with how we imagine the future. One can learn so much from the way people before us thought.

They used the language they had available to them to explain things. It sounds laughable to us now because we have actual words to describe the new technology. Think how funny our science fiction will sound in a hundred years!

It is also an interesting social commentary on them. Their obsession with fruit... It was a delicacy to them. We take it for granted. No one thinks what it would be like to not have fruit during the winter. That was a real want for them.

I will say though that I find the one about people hardly needing medication laughable in that it is actually the complete opposite. Well, the opposite in that we are bombarded by the "need" for hundreds of pills a day. Notice I put "need" in quotations...

Again, thank you for that. I'm interested to see where you are going to take this.

[edit on 9/14/2009 by glitch88]

I still think we should have gone with a tube system. How practical!

Thanks for the great read. Very weird reading something from only 100 years ago. I'm gonna laugh in 2110 when people say they found transcripts from some place called "above top secret". Wait til they read the predictions here. Please forgive us future people, we're not all lunatics!!!!

S+F

[edit on 14-9-2009 by VirginiaGreen]

reply to post by VirginiaGreen


Yes, we are..

Slayer, are you gonna make some centurian predictions now? Best prediciton thread is one that cannot be disproven in your lifetime!