4 ms·

Ignore the blogspam, original link: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-for-the-year-2011-1911.html http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/20

by taitems 16y ago

Ignore the blogspam, original link: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-for-the-year-2011-1911.html http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-prediction...

hugh3 16y ago
Much better. Let's review the accuracy of his predictions: 1. In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world's machinery), generated by "hydraulic" wheels. Accuracy: Pretty good (please let's not take this as a cue for another thread about the lack of a high-speed rail network in country-of-your-choice though). I'm not sure what "hydraulic wheels" means here. 2. He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside Accuracy: Very good, though too slow by a factor of three (yes yes, airport security sucks, blah blah blah, I love pre-empting threads). 3. The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost -- of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradlehis father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother's boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood her ladyship fancies. Accuracy: Yes and no. We could have steel furniture, but we generally don't, because it tends to be ugly. I could build a lightweight sideboard out of sheet metal if I wanted to, but I'm not sure why I'd bother. In any case, chipboard turns out to have been the best option for low-cost furniture (hello Ikea). 4. Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound I have no idea where this comes from. Maybe we could make a book with ultra-thin metal pages, but wouldn't they be so insanely delicate that you'd rip the pages when you tried to turn them? Of course we have better ways to carry around an encyclopaedia in a tiny volume. 5. "Gold," he says, "has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel. We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in different proportions." This falls into the category "lolwut"? Was this really widely believed in 1911? 6. In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern Except that gold is really heavy and extremely soft and as a result one of the worst possible materials for shipbuilding?
- wvenable 16y ago
  > The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost He seemed to way over-emphasize the use of metal but way under-estimated the use of plastic!
- ars 16y ago
  If you replace "steel" with "plastic" it would be pretty accurate. But I'm really surprised at the suggestion to use gold structurally - even then he had to have known it's too soft for that. Plus anything common is no longer luxurious, so if we did have cheap gold no one would want it.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    The only real advantage of gold, once it's cheap, is that it doesn't corrode. In a world before (?) galvanised iron and stainless steel and aluminium and titanium and even before the sort of high-quality steel paint we have nowadays, this was a bigger deal.
- javert 16y ago
  I don't think people give this guy enough credit for his predictions. To take the side in defense of Edison... He was right that buildings would be fabricated from steel and other cheap materials; He was right that consumer goods would be fabricated from some cheaper material (but it's plastic); He was right that we'd have a library contained in a single book-like object (e.g. the Kindle); He was right that metals are all made of the same stuff (as is all matter); we haven't figured out how to convert them yet, though (and maybe it'll end up taking way too much energy; I'm no physicist). Basically, he predicted what kinds of things people would want that would also be technologically feasible; he just didn't correctly predict how they would become technologically feasible. (With the exception of gold-lined ships. That makes me wonder if the source of these predictions is all that trustworthy, because Edison clearly was no idiot.)

by taitems 16y ago

Ignore the blogspam, original link: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-for-the-year-2011-1911.html http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-prediction...

hugh3 16y ago

Much better. Let's review the accuracy of his predictions: 1. In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the world's machinery), generated by "hydraulic" wheels. Accuracy: Pretty good (please let's not take this as a cue for another thread about the lack of a high-speed rail network in country-of-your-choice though). I'm not sure what "hydraulic wheels" means here. 2. He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside Accuracy: Very good, though too slow by a factor of three (yes yes, airport security sucks, blah blah blah, I love pre-empting threads). 3. The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost -- of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradlehis father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother's boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood her ladyship fancies. Accuracy: Yes and no. We could have steel furniture, but we generally don't, because it tends to be ugly. I could build a lightweight sideboard out of sheet metal if I wanted to, but I'm not sure why I'd bother. In any case, chipboard turns out to have been the best option for low-cost furniture (hello Ikea). 4. Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound I have no idea where this comes from. Maybe we could make a book with ultra-thin metal pages, but wouldn't they be so insanely delicate that you'd rip the pages when you tried to turn them? Of course we have better ways to carry around an encyclopaedia in a tiny volume. 5. "Gold," he says, "has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel. We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in different proportions." This falls into the category "lolwut"? Was this really widely believed in 1911? 6. In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern Except that gold is really heavy and extremely soft and as a result one of the worst possible materials for shipbuilding?

wvenable 16y ago
> The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost He seemed to way over-emphasize the use of metal but way under-estimated the use of plastic!
ars 16y ago
If you replace "steel" with "plastic" it would be pretty accurate. But I'm really surprised at the suggestion to use gold structurally - even then he had to have known it's too soft for that. Plus anything common is no longer luxurious, so if we did have cheap gold no one would want it.
- hugh3 16y ago
  The only real advantage of gold, once it's cheap, is that it doesn't corrode. In a world before (?) galvanised iron and stainless steel and aluminium and titanium and even before the sort of high-quality steel paint we have nowadays, this was a bigger deal.
javert 16y ago
I don't think people give this guy enough credit for his predictions. To take the side in defense of Edison... He was right that buildings would be fabricated from steel and other cheap materials; He was right that consumer goods would be fabricated from some cheaper material (but it's plastic); He was right that we'd have a library contained in a single book-like object (e.g. the Kindle); He was right that metals are all made of the same stuff (as is all matter); we haven't figured out how to convert them yet, though (and maybe it'll end up taking way too much energy; I'm no physicist). Basically, he predicted what kinds of things people would want that would also be technologically feasible; he just didn't correctly predict how they would become technologically feasible. (With the exception of gold-lined ships. That makes me wonder if the source of these predictions is all that trustworthy, because Edison clearly was no idiot.)