> If someone in 1900 had made similar curves, I wonder how they would look to us. On that count, I wonder if there are similar projections from, say, 1950 that

> If someone in 1900 had made similar curves, I wonder how they would look to us. On that count, I wonder if there are similar projections from, say, 1950 that we could look at and see how they turned out. Thomas Malthus attempted to describe the future of the world population in 1798 in his book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted a doubling of the global population every 25 years until a lack of food limited the population through hardship or famine and death. Pierre François Verhulst went on to mathematically model this bounded exponential growth and, in doing so, created the logistic function. The necessary data to create a chart like the one in the article didn't exist then, but Malthus' book did contribute to the passage of the Census Act of 1800, which enabled the first census of England, Scotland and Wales.