21st Century Predictions From 1900

WHILST Twitter is most commonly used for celebrity tittle-tattle and waves of drivel about the weather, daily food consumption and other banalities, occasionally you do come across a gem.

 This week it was Twitter that alerted me to a piece of old media titled ‘What May Happen In The Next Hundred Years’ from The Ladies Home Journal (LHJ), of December 1900.

A university education will be free to every man and woman.

Ladies Home Journal Dec 1900LHJ was one of the leading women’s magazines in the United States in the twentieth century, back when social networking was unheard of and women were classed as intellectually inferior to men. The article was of course written by a man – John Elfreth Watkins Jr – but reveals great insight into where people felt society was heading, 112 years ago.

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.’

Five Correct Predictions

1. Gymnastics will begin in the nursery.

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.

There will be no weaklings in the 21st century

2. 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.  Liquid-air refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.

3. 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.

4. 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'.

Say bye to the 'Hello Girls'

5. Ready-cooked meals.

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.

Five Incorrect Predictions

1. There will be no street cars in our large cities.

All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with 'moving-sidewalk' stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains.  Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

2. 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.

Mosquitoes are still very much alive

3. Peas as large as beets.

Peas and beans will be as large as beets are today. 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. Cranberries, gooseberries and currants will be as large as oranges.  One cantaloupe will supply an entire family.

4. How children will be taught.

A university education will be free to every man and woman. Poor students will be given free board, free clothing and free books if ambitious and actually unable to meet their school and college expenses. Medical inspectors regularly visiting the public schools will furnish poor children free eyeglasses, free dentistry and free medical attention of every kind. The very poor will, when necessary, get free rides to and from school and free lunches between sessions. In vacation time poor children will be taken on trips to various parts of the world. Etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools.

'A university education will be free'

5. There will be no wild animals except in menageries.

Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few high breeds will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of today. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse.

What do you predict for the next 100 years?

Click here to read the full article from 1900.

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