51 ms·

What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

• jameshart 5y ago
  Regarding flying: "The problem is mainly one of artificial heating and ventilation to enable the aeronauts to survive." And indeed, ventilation is the primary concern among air passengers in 2022.
• golemotron 5y ago
  I can't read the text. Does it say everyone will be overweight, inactive, neurotic, trapped in their houses and living lives devoid of in-person social interaction?
• jdlyga 5y ago
  It's always interesting to read these. Everyone assumes that technological progress will continue along the exact same lines as before. And nobody really anticipates the social progress and changes that truly set us apart from 1922. If we assume 2122 will just be the same world with better electronics, that probably wouldn't be very accurate.
• nojs 5y ago
  This is amazingly accurate. It contains several predictions that would have been very difficult when extrapolating based on life experience at the time. Consider how difficult it would be to predict how the world will look in 2122. I don’t think I’d be this close to the mark.
• SimplGy 5y ago
  > I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will roll by their side.
• kierkegaard_s 5y ago
  Interesting that the author here made the assumption opposite of WaitButWhy's Tim Urban in his AI article (see below). Author asserted pretty early that future progress wouldn't advance as quickly as past progress has. Or at least that's how I interpreted it. (https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...) "Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someone’s face and chat with them even though they’re on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity. This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing—those words aren’t big enough. He might actually die. But here’s the interesting thing—if he then went back to 1750 and got jealous that we got to see his reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, he’d take the time machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500, bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked by a lot of things—but he wouldn’t die. It would be far less of an insane experience for him, because while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they were much less different than 1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shit about space and physics, he’d be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with that new imperialism fad, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1750—transportation, communication, etc.—definitely wouldn’t make him die."
• almogbaku 5y ago
  this is pretty cool to see how he predicted some things pretty good
  • bramgn 5y ago
    True, but also how outlandish certain ideas were about peeling your house clean and replacing meals with pills...
    • JofArnold 5y ago
      Huel?
      • hwers 5y ago
        That's a funny one since Huel and Soylent kinda came about because of the 1920s meme idea that pills would replace meals in the future. A lot of these might just be self fulfilling prophecies.
        • giantg2 5y ago
          That's generally how things work. Sci-fi and stuff influences the thoughts of others to help make the ideas turn into creations. I think they even made a documentary about all the Star Trek props that became a reality, but I don't remember. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/world/gallery/science-fiction-inventions-became-reality-spc-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/world/gallery/science-fiction...
          • webmaven 5y ago
            You might like this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreams_Our_Stuff_Is_Made_Of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreams_Our_Stuff_Is_Made...
      • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
        Huel / Soylent for nutrition, psyllium pills for filling / bowel operation, pretty much that yeah lol
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• krapp 5y ago
  I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. Hubris... hubris never changes.
  • hwers 5y ago
    I kinda feel like this will be true in the next 100 years though (2122).
    • Ostrogodsky 5y ago
      Yep, bet on an unchanging human nature,keeping things from the past around, some social progress in certain areas but not as fast as you would like it and that the world of 2122 will be less alien to a 2022 person than the 2022 world to a 1922 person.
  • danielrpa 5y ago
    Hubris yes, but perhaps not wrong. I'm not sure if the progress between 1922-2022 was as significant as the progress between 1822-1922. These are two 100-year periods of immense progress. Have in mind that he's referring to the 100 yr period that brought us cars, airplanes, railroads, telephones, light bulbs, electricity, electromagnetism, relativity, evolution, etc.
  • Macha 5y ago
    From a technological perspective, I'm not sure they're wrong? 1922 had railways and cars and mass transit which had already started increasing urbanisation vs 1822, skyscrapers were already being built, passenger air travel was a go, telephones and electricity existed in cities. The internet and computing is certainly a big shift, but from a visible changes to the world perspective I think 2022 is more alike 1922 than 1922 was alike 1822.
    • weisk 5y ago
• viraptor 5y ago
  The "less cleaning due to less coal" part is not something we really think much about these days, but the older limestone buildings can really show the difference. Here's a view with the old and either pressure-washed or redone wall: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wso9gae4JPsN6NaG6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wso9gae4JPsN6NaG6 and that's on a residential side street... Imagine getting your clothes slowly covered with it every time you go out.
  • glandium 5y ago
    Remember how e.g. Notre Dame de Paris looked like before they cleaned it?
  • kinbiko 5y ago
    Before clicking on this link I was thinking "oh yeah, I know of one such example near where I used to live in Bath". And then I clicked the link... and now I'm terrified of you.
    • viraptor 5y ago
      We may have met :-) It was actually hard to find a good example on street view today - the whole centre is washed now and Cheap/Westgate aren't black for over a decade.
      • kingcharles 5y ago
        Bath posse, represent.
  • adamjb 5y ago
    I live in a suburb with a power station that was converted from coal to gas in the 70s. My older neighbours have told me that they had to careful when hanging clothes out to try, lest they got so dirty that they'd have to wash them again.
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    Now it's just an invisible polluter/killer.
• bambax 5y ago
  It's striking that most of his true predictions were already in place in the sixties, a mere 40 years after the article was written (and some, much earlier). When we think about the distant future we simply think about tomorrow.
  • golergka 5y ago
    > It's striking that most of his true predictions were already in place in the sixties In first world countries, may be. Now more of them are true for more and more people all around the globe too.
    • Damogran6 5y ago
      “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003” ― William Gibson
      • golergka 5y ago
        With time, I started to interpret this quote differently. It's not that one place is more in future than another; it's that even different parts of the future are unevenly distributed among the globe. Now, more than ever, different countries sometimes seem very advanced in some ways but at the same time backwards in others.
  • Damogran6 5y ago
    I think it's very easy to dismiss the creeping surge of the future...You have computers EVERYWHERE, and with the Cloud - somewhere else...but you also have access to a significant percentage of the music recorded over the last 80 years, the ability to predict future health issues by sending some spit to someone via the mail, the internet from SPACE, and a supply chain where it's easier to make a $.62 knicknack half a world away, put it in a container on a boat and it can be requested and sent to you same day, using your cellphone....while it wirelessly sends that music to your ears using devices that remove unwanted environmental noise.
• haunter 5y ago
  >Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. This is very interesting especially if you think "synthetic foods" not just literally but as take out, processed products and such. I know a lot of young professional people who technically never cook. Like almost never and whatever they have at home is just snacks, if you hungry > order. There are a lot people like these. >It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will roll by their side. Well Soylent do exist so that's not far fetched either.
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    The “lunch will be a pill” stuff is always funny to me. There’s a major volume issue unless you’re gonna have me eat chunks of uranium or neutron star or something.
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      I thought it was goofy until I remembered that some people eat pills for lunch.
    • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      There's Soylent and similar meal replacements, but that's a diet shake for people who try to min-max their life for some reason.
      • galangalalgol 5y ago
        I was excited about the kickstarter because while a recovering alcoholic can completely stop using alcohol, a food addict always has to eat a little. Something bland, and quick I didn't think about was a plus. But afyer the Kickstarter they replaced the fish oil with polyunsaturated vegetable oil in powder form and dropped the rice protein content for more carbs. My triglycerides shot through the roof after the first few months of that recipe.
• viraptor 5y ago
  When he mentions the lack of cables, he's pretty close with most of them being underground. But also he's incredible close if you consider the mess of cables that was the Stockholm telephone tower, functioning until 1913 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/09/the-stockholm-telephone-tower.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/09/the-stockholm-telephon...
  • worldvoyageur 5y ago
    It is an excellent article, I agree. However, it strikes me that the author was more likely female than male. (gender deliberately obscured in the author's name, 'W.L. George', for instance.). If a male writer, the article is even more impressive given the clear sensitivity to, and awareness of, women's issues and the likely impact of technology and social changes on women. That said, the author was likely a person of privilege rather than someone more representative of the population of 1922. A starving writer was unlikely to have been so focused on the challenges of hiring good household staff.
    • Maskawanian 5y ago
      Author was male: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George
      • worldvoyageur 5y ago
        Cool! Excellent predictions for the future, not just for technology, but also for social change from a broader perspective than just that of the lived experience of the author. (W.L. = Walter Lionel, as revealled by a bit more searching)
    • macns 5y ago
      "Cautious feminist" describes himself as: But it is unlikely that women will have an achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery. He's definitely on point 100 years later.
• Xcelerate 5y ago
  And in almost one hundred years, we still haven’t made much progress on the fundamental questions in quantum mechanics, other than perhaps Bell’s theorem in the 60s. I wonder if Einstein, Dirac, et al. would have thought in the early 1930s that the measurement problem would remain unresolved and that there would still not be a consistent theory for QM and GR almost a century later.
  • thenoblesunfish 5y ago
    His comments about the slowing pace of scientific advancement really struck me. I have felt the same thing, often. That in 1922, we were actually somewhat close to the end of discovering all the really interesting things about physics: that is, those things which really shook up our understanding of the universe, but were still somehow comprehensible to our little human brains. I'm beginning to think that it wasn't just overenthusiasm that led me to be pretty disappointed when I went to get a PhD in science - it's that I grew up reading about the results of the most interesting period, scientifically, that man has ever had, which is now over.
    • jerb 5y ago
      Scientific progress has slowed, but engineering progress is only just beginning. For instance, the electronic transport chain of respiration/photosynthesis, is a series of quantum tunnels. Man has barely scratched the surface of quantum-level control which nature already exhibits.
      • thoughtsimple 5y ago
        The number of transistors produced in 2021 is a bit mind boggling if you do the math. These are nanotechnology produced at a rate by humans that rivals any large physics number. By my calculation, Apple alone via TSMC produces something like 1x10^18 transistors per year. Add up Intel, Samsung and the rest of TSMC's customers and the number goes far higher. We are so used to it, we don't boggle at the concept any more but we should.
  • luis8 5y ago
• datavirtue 5y ago
  He landed everything except the peeling furniture (kudos for the Ikea prediction) and labor conditions. Interesting how labor hasn't advanced much except for women in the workplace (he nailed that perfectly).
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    I like how the author predicted that a hundred years wouldn't be enough to ensure gender equality.
• tomxor 5y ago
  This is surprisingly accurate, reserved and balanced through the lens of society as well as science. I was expecting something more fanciful like flying horses or whatnot.
  • Brendinooo 5y ago
    Yeah, I think he had a good understanding of the implications of the newer technology of his day. You don't know what you don't know so there's nothing about computers here, but most of this article was really well done.
  • apozem 5y ago
    These are better than 99% of predictions because the author has a good eye for what will change (technology, transportation, consumer goods) and what won’t (human nature).
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    Except that: > I'm sure that technological advancement in 2022 will be amazing, but they will be nothing as amazing as the present day than it is over 100 years ago (i.e. 1822). I don't know about that statement.
    • another_story 5y ago
      Cars, trains, airplanes, electricity used in consumer devices, movies, telephones, radio, instantaneous intercontinental communication, etc... We have some cool stuff compared to 1922, but you could argue the shift was greater.
      • feintruled 5y ago
        Reminds me of the Gavin Belson freakout in Silicon Valley when his holographic call started freezing and they suggested he went to audio only "Fuck you, the audio's still working! Audio worked a hundred fucking years ago!"
    • Nbox9 5y ago
• overthemoon 5y ago
  It's interesting to compare this to the WEF future projections: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differently-well-live-in-2030/?sh=56382ee91735 https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... Especially with regards to this passage:: "In 2022 [economic development] will be as finished as it is to-day in England. American wealth will then be either developed or known, and all of it will belong to somebody. There will be no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day. Those Americans will know that it is practically certain that they will die much in the same position as the ones in which they were born. Those Americans will therefore be less enterprising and much more pleasure loving. They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much. The effects of this, which I am sure sounds regrettable to many of my readers, will, in my opinion, be good. It was essential that the American race should be capable of intense labor and intense ambition if it was to develop its vast country. But one result has been haste, overwork, noise, all of which is bad for the nerves. In 2022 America will have made her fortune and will be enjoying it as well as she can."
  • imtringued 5y ago
    Already in 1918, shortly after World War I, when everybody talked about peace and many international organizations were created to secure that peace, Gesell published the following warning in a letter to the editor of the newspaper "Zeitung am Mittag" in Berlin: "In spite of the holy promise of all people to banish war, once and for all, in spite of the cry of millions 'Never a war again,' in spite of all the hopes for a better future, I have this to say: If the present monetary system, based on interest and compound interest, remains in operation, I dare to predict today, that it will take less than 25 years for us to have a new and even worse war. I can foresee the coming development clearly. The present degree of technological advancement will quickly result in a record performance of industry. The build-up of capital will be rapid in spite of the enormous losses during the war, and through its over- supply will lower the interest rate. Money will then be hoarded. Economic activities will diminish and increasing numbers of unemployed persons will roam the streets; within the discontented masses wild, revolutionary ideas will arise and also the poisonous plant called "Super-Nationalism" will proliferate. No country will understand the other, and the end can only be war again. (28)" The only good news is that our fractional reserve system is not as rigid as a gold standard. I.e. we will get a silent depression rather than a great depression.
• evancoop 5y ago
  The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve. We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.
  • GrumpyNl 5y ago
    Jules Verne did a pretty good job.
  • amelius 5y ago
    Stallman could have.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of longevity or whatever else. The reality is that we do not know. Some things may be out of our reach forever, but contemporary world has by far the highest count of scientists ever and the talent pool is widening as countries such as Bangladesh escape their previous crushing poverty. To this comes politics. A second Cold War with China may be terrifying and yet enormously scientifically productive, much like WWII and the previous Cold War was. I am personally not willing to make any technical/scientific predictions beyond 2030. Political even less so.
    • Guillaume86 5y ago
      > Too many smart (or smart-sounding) people either here or on Reddit claim casually that some X will take hundreds of years to do. Where X may be artificial intelligence, conquest of longevity or whatever else. > The reality is that we do not know Yeah, but it works both ways, I see a lot of people on reddit claiming aging will be solved in X years (usually in their lifetime) and it does not sound any smarter.
• henvic 5y ago
  oh man, had he predicted that a lot of people would be going nuts on digital stamps that might be copied for free, that'd be hilarious...
• bencollier49 5y ago
  What I find fascinating about these predictions is that a lot of them came to pass around 1970 and then fell back. For example nationalisation of utilities and railways (here in the UK), communal living (tower blocks), and so on. Not to mention "a great liberalism of mind and the freedom to say anything"....
  • timeon 5y ago
    That idea about 'tower blocks in gardens' reminds me what happened 11 years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Charter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Charter
• nottorp 5y ago
  He got a lot of things right but, like everyone else, they didn't predict the internet and its consequences. Does anyone know of a proper prediction of the internet? And I don't mean predicting handheld devices or wireless networking. Predicting the decentralized communication part that makes distance irellevant and upgrades point to point communication to group. And its consequence that it's very easy now to find a group that shares your biases :)
  • user3939382 5y ago
    Yep -- check out Marshall McLuhan & the Global Village, which he put out in the 60s. Very prescient.
    • nottorp 5y ago
      Hmm I read him long ago, but I vaguely recollect he didn't catch the decentralization much? If he did I must reread. Edit. Oh oops. Read the summary for Gutenberg Galaxy on wikipedia. Turns out i MUST reread.
  • jkestner 5y ago
    Not exactly a prediction, but The Victorian Internet is a good read: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/victorian-internet-9781635573961/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/victorian-internet-97816355739... That revolution was more about the speed that information travels than who has access to it.
  • max_ 5y ago
    1950's America had online shopping.[0]. This may be the closest thing to today's websites. [0]https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/01/14/online-shopping-in-the-1950s/ https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/01/14/online-shopping-in...
  • azangru 5y ago
    > like everyone else, they didn't predict the internet Nor the computer, personal or otherwise; nor robotics. It's funny to see how he could predict, sometimes with surprising accuracy, the trajectory of development of technologies that were already in place, but could not fathom what had not yet been discovered and thus had not yet entered the public discourse.
• wombatmobile 5y ago
  Is there a text version of this? I’m having trouble navigating the pdf with one hand on my phone from this hospital bed.
  • nyuszika7h 5y ago
    There's a button called "Show Text". https://i.imgur.com/sf7ztjZ.png https://i.imgur.com/sf7ztjZ.png
    • wombatmobile 5y ago
      Top. Thanks!
      • jerrre 5y ago
        Off-topic but: is "Top" in this context a Dutchism? I only know it from Dutch people
        • wombatmobile 5y ago
          Australian. Short for “top notch”.
• avnigo 5y ago
  What I understood from this article is that science and technology may be more accurately projected than society and politics; I would imagine because those seem to be more chaotic processes, but also more easily carry the bias of the writer. The article also highlights some shortcomings of the 1922 zeitgeist as there does not seem to be much thought about the positive or negative environmental impacts of technology, other than on air quality, or any talk on climate change.
  • nielsole 5y ago
    Pigou had just published the economics of welfare two years earlier. The tragedy of the commons would only be published in 1968. I wonder how much externalities were a commonly known concept in 1922. Resource exhaustion of oil he got more right than club of Rome even in 1972.
  • rossdavidh 5y ago
    Well some of it is what your current standard is. Replacing the horse, which puts feces on the road (albeit less smelly than human feces, still really bad in the quantity of a city's traffic), with the automobile, was actually a great improvement in the environment. We don't think of it as such, because we never saw horses in the quantity that a modern city has of automobiles. But what kind of toxic sludge we would have gotten from that much horse manure in a city is difficult for the modern mind to imagine. Similarly, the environmental impact of coal, when it was the dominant method of heating a home, was not in some decades-off global warming, it was in things like the London Fog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog), a pretty horrific environmental situation. Moving to non-coal methods of heating the home (which he mentions) is a big environmental improvement.
• axegon_ 5y ago
  > It does not follow that, scientifically, the year 2022 should fail to be amazing. Well... About that...
• aronpye 5y ago
  I wish the quality of prose as well as underlying journalism of today’s mainstream media and newspapers matched those of yesteryear. When reading the posted article, the decline in quality is shown to be immense.
  • virgilp 5y ago
    Average quality, yes. Total, and even max quality? Not so clear. In number of articles/ books that are above a given quality bar? I wouldn't bet on 1922.
• 11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
  If you're curious about the writer, W. L. George, he was hired by the Herald to write a daily column in the Women's Page: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/24655109/new-york-herald/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/24655109/new-york-herald/
• gadders 5y ago
  " A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms." I wonder what we would show the girl of 1922? Space travel and obviously the internet & computers come to mind. Antibiotics, DNA? Anything else?
  • sixQuarks 5y ago
    Worldstarhiphop.com
  • bspammer 5y ago
    I'd think somewhere like Times Square, the strip in Vegas, or Shinjuku in Tokyo at night would be mindblowing. Then probably show her VR, and a modern action movie in 3D. VR still blows the minds of everyone I show it to. I can't imagine what kind of reaction someone from 1922 would give.
  • adrian_b 5y ago
    Internet and computers are the most different from what existed before 1922, but already then everybody was familiar with telegraphy, telephony and wireless communications and various fiction works about intelligent robots had existed for millennia (starting with the Iliad). Space travel was also present in many fiction works, the best known being several novels of Jules Verne and of H. G. Wells. Antibiotics were a huge progress, but the concept would not have been a surprise for anyone, because searching for substances that one would ingest to kill the parasites causing various diseases was already a well understood method in medicine, e.g. like using quinine against the protozoan that causes malaria or organo-arsenic compounds against the bacteria that cause syphilis. Even if already in antiquity some have supposed that many diseases are caused by very small invisible parasites, only during the 19th century the causes for most common infectious diseases have been identified. So also in this domain the differences between 1922 and 1822 are much larger than between 1922 and 2022. By 1922, genetics was much better understood than in 1822 even if it was not known yet that it is based on information encoded in the molecules of nucleic acids. I cannot find any domain of science and technology where the difference between 1922 and 1822 is not much larger than between 2022 and 1922. On the other hand, in 1922 there was still a very large part of the human population whose life had not been affected yet by the progresses of the 19th century, e.g. who had never used a telephone, an automobile or a train, much less an airplane or a computing machine or a washing machine. The main difference between 1922 and 2022 is that all the technologies that in 1922 existed only in extremely expensive devices or in experimental devices now exist in cheap devices that are used by most people and such devices have sizes and energy consumptions that are many orders of magnitude less than what could have been done with the technologies from 100 years ago. The main progress during the last 100 years has been in practical engineering, with much less progress in basic science.
• FartyMcFarter 5y ago
  This is accurate enough that midway through the article I started wondering if it was a prank written recently.
• whiddershins 5y ago
  Surprisingly good predictions on a number of fronts.
• I-M-S 5y ago
  If anyone else is interested in the author who exerted such prescience, Wikipedia has an article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George
• titzer 5y ago
  > The people of 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky... Haha, so wrong. All I see is power lines everywhere, and I can't unsee them. SO ugly.
  • iandanforth 5y ago
    Total tangent, but I too hate wires and was pleasantly surprised how easy https://cleanup.pictures/ https://cleanup.pictures/ makes it to remove them from any and all photos. I'm not affiliated in any way and sorry for the random. :)
  • kseistrup 5y ago
    You always know when you see an American film because of all the powerlines, and I always wonder why they are not put underground.
    • titzer 5y ago
      I know, I grew up in the US, moved to Germany, and moved back. There are so many. It doesn't look like a modern country at all.
    • beeboop 5y ago
      It's expensive, no one wants to pay for it, and our general political leadership is inept at best and corrupt at worst and is incapable of managing reasonable infrastructure projects.
      • throwawaygh 5y ago
        Serious question: what are the benefits of burying cables? Purely aesthetic? Losing power less than once a year due to a downed line really just isn't a big enough deal to justify the expenditure. Even low-prob/high-risk event justifications aren't particularly compelling (there are much more important ways to harden the grid). If this went up for a vote in my muni, I'd probably be a "no". So many better ways to spend the money, even if we scope to just electricity transmission. My read on this has always been that the US has above-ground cables mostly because it wasn't bombed to hell at any point after the discovery that it's nice to bury power cables.
• wombatmobile 5y ago
  > It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. The relationship between a man and a maid is a core characteristic of a society. The complexity of changing such relationships is attested to by TFA, and yet, in many places, over a hundred years, we see (hard fought) change. A hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, the downfalls of Dominic Strauss-Kahn, Jeffrey Epstein, and Harvey Weinstein were inconceivable. So was #MeToo. But there’s as much tech in the hash tag as there is in the x-ray, or more if you just count the investment dollars. Technology and social relations define and redefine each other in long epicycles.
• dave333 5y ago
  Article is pretty good and gets a lot of things right. So what will the world be like in 2122? Climate catastrophe? Will AI have taken over? Will democracy survive? Will people still travel or just interact virtually/remotely?
• ctdonath 5y ago
  Note that many of the predictions which didn’t happen proved doable but were a bad idea.
• parksy 5y ago
  What stands out to me is the prescience in the speed and penetration of technological advancements juxtaposed with an apparent blind spot for the advancements in social change. Even the most dire or utopian science fiction of the early to mid 20th century seems to reasonably accurately predict technological changes but somehow expects that future social structures will somehow fall into place or adapt to the technology. They imagine these wild technological advancements and bludgeon them into their current-day social mores. Thinking about today, where the topic of the day is distributed trustless computing and so on, it's easy to imagine now the cat's out of the bag that in 100 years, old institutions like banks, notaries, record-keeping (Hansards etc) could be obsolete, knowledge becomes distributed and every human commands one or more nodes in a constant system of cross-referencing - clients and servers cease to be relevant as a concept, information is just a pool you dip into as needed (with helpful AI assistants to bring things to your attention and/or demand your attention). It could be so pervasive it wouldn't garner a second's thought in the mind of a 2122 individual. Information is just there, always, forever, and always cross-checked for correctness. Duh. (not saying this is even an ideal future, or likely, but it's a trend that's easily extrapolated) But if that did come to pass, how does that change the fabric of society in 2122? Does the relationship between society and the products it demands and produces change significantly? Does the status-quo stay more or less the same between the workers and the organisers? Do we find a way to deal with cultural differences globally or adopt the "metaverse" and slowly fragment into virtual islands of relative ideological same-ness? These are much harder things to predict, just how in 1922 the idea of not having servants at home to do the bidding of the family matriarch seemed so far-fetched that even an imagined hundred years of progress couldn't fully erase the notion; what concepts do we see as being so firmly entrenched in our culture(s) today that no upheaval of technology could convince us they'd also be on the way out, if not obsolete, in 100 years. I love seeing these old predictions as much for what they got right as for what they missed. I showed my 12 year old daughter this article and we had a light-hearted conversation about it but she said something that struck me; "society probably won't even be here in 100 years" - I hope that isn't true, it's not something I've directly taught her to believe, but we're surrounded on all fronts by media filled with dire predictions of humanity's collapse and self-destruction on a daily basis, so I'm going to have to work to instil some hope. I am heartened slightly as historically it seems we're really bad at predicting how society as a whole will change long-term, so I do hope we're wrong on the old boiled frogs / status-quo inertia analogies, and that our species makes some giant leaps in terms of collective environmental and social responsibility in the next 100 years. Nothing really profound I know just a dad pondering his kids futures, fingers crossed we figure some things out.
• lastofthemojito 5y ago
  Impressively thought-out article, but given the publication date I'm also surprised there's no mention of the impacts of the flu pandemic of 1918-1920. So much ink is currently being spilled about how so many things will change thanks to the COVID pandemic, whether architecture or remote work or medical breakthroughs. I guess once the flu pandemic subsided it was no longer at the forefront of thought?
  • wmiel 5y ago
    The Spanish flu largely overlapped with the WW1, and since its 2nd wave had a high toll among people with strong immune system (ex. young male) the perception was to a large degree mixed with the perception of war and its casualties, at least in Europe. The name 'spanish flu' itself also stems from the fact that most countries involved in the war didn't want to talk too much about the Flu, while Spain retained neutrality and didn't have incentives to keep it in the dark - this could also be a reason that people were putting the aftermath of the pandemic in the same bucket as the outcome of the Great War imo. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic
• paradite 5y ago
  Yes, the prediction is incredibly accurate. So my question would be: Is this a case of selection bias (survival bias)? Did we cherry picked one accurate prediction (at the right time) out of many different predictions made about the future?
  • sovnade 5y ago
    That only seems relevant if the author of this had a vast number of predictions. Overall, yeah, there were tons. That doesn't detract from how accurate this particular piece was.
    • Nbox9 5y ago
      I’m unsure, unless the author is of especially high renown. If there was two dozen “What life will be like in 100 years” articles published per year in decently sized newspapers we will have 240 such articles to choose from this decade. Surely we would only see the most accurate of these predictions, and that is survival bias. Of course, maybe there was not a large variance between predictions, or everyone is accurate to a similar level of degree. In that case some other method of selecting which old predictions we read will be at play, perhaps based on which publications were better archived or random chance.
      • sovnade 5y ago
        It depends if we're judging the overall predictions of everyone, or this specific author's predictions. I always tend to look at it at the author-level, because otherwise the infinite monkeys theorem applies anyway. I think this author should be given credit for the accuracy. He can't control what everyone else is writing and how accurate or inaccurate they were. He can only control his own predictions, and they were very good.
        • Nbox9 5y ago
          I don’t think we can look at this at the author level. Imagine if we had 1 million different authors making predictions, certainly some of them in the population will be very accurate and in retrospect they’ll look like geniuses.
• marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I was fascinated to read about the predictions of communal-living skyscrapers with their own management, etc. Eerily similar to the Hab Blocks of Mega City 1 I then came to horrifying realisation that 1977 (when Judge Dredd first appeared) is only 55 years after the article, and now 45 years behind us(!!!). More or less halfway. Totally reasonable for them to have read this article, and still been far enough away from now to assume that this will still happen. This could easily have been the inspiration for Blocks.
  • bleuchase 5y ago
    And now we have Charlie Munger gleefully making faceless, windowless monoliths a reality.
• aksgoel 5y ago
  Loved the poetic tone in the writing (1992). A lot less try than today’s writing. What caused writing tone to shift over the century?
  • paradite 5y ago
    People having less attention span (instant gratification), favouring utility and efficiency over aesthetics.
• ramesh31 5y ago
  >"It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same." Nailed it.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  More importantly, what FONTS will be in vogue in 100 years???
• jugg1es 5y ago
  The most striking to me are passages like this: "It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded the idea that they are primarily "makers of men". Most fit women will then be following an individual career." ... "But it is unlikely that that women will have achieved equality with men."
  • stareblinkstare 5y ago
  • beeboop 5y ago
    He definitely missed the mark about alimony or men not bearing the majority of child support
    • yurishimo 5y ago
      I don't think he did. My mother paid child support to my father after the divorce. I think in most instances, it's simply more convenient for the mother to take the children in a divorce, or the kids are too young to choose, so it ends that way by default. There is no rule for it though.
      • beeboop 5y ago
        The default way still being women that get the children doesn't really change that the dynamic that gender versus child support is not meaningfully any different than the 1920s. Women's share of child support has gone from, I assume, ~0% in 1922 (I didn't look it up but I imagine it was less than 1%) to around 5% in 2022 in terms of dollars paid. Men going from 99% to 95% of child support costs isn't really a noteworthy change and doesn't align with a prediction that it would be meaningfully different.
    • Ancapistani 5y ago
      I don't think he did. Alimony and child support do apply to women as well as men in the US, though it's obviously not equally distributed today. Even if we assume that's not because of a flawed system, I can think of several reasons it might be the case. For example, any or all of the following could cause that in a fair system: * wage earners are still disproportionately men * women tend to be much more likely to retain (and desire) custody of children * women tend to be less likely to work outside the home While I do believe the system is biased against men, I don't think it's nearly as bad as it may seem depending on your own view of things. There are plenty of stories out there of men who have been unfairly saddled with alimony and child support, and those stories get a lot of play. I think it's fair to say that the trope of "a woman left penniless, with no marketable skills, to care for a family after the man left to shirk his responsibilities" is a trope for a reason - because it is and always has been a common ocurrance.
• tabtab 5y ago
  Where's the flying cars, dammit! We were promised flying cars! Jail somebody, the future is all rigged.
• EGreg 5y ago
  Dude is describing tenements in Hong Kong…
• westcort 5y ago
  Another fragment from 1922 (found with https://www.locserendipity.com/Google.html https://www.locserendipity.com/Google.html): A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW Mary A. Ford O mighty human brotherhood! why fiercely war and strive, While God's great world has ample space for everything alive? Broad fields uncultured and unclaimed, are waiting for the plow Of progress that shall make them bloom, a hundred years from now. Why should we try so earnestly in life's short, narrow span, On golden stairs to climb so high above our brother man? Why blindly at an earthly shrine in slavish homage bow? Our gold will rust, ourselves be dust, a hundred years from now. Why prize so much the world's applause? Why dread so much its blame? A fleeting echo is its voice of censure or of fame; The praise that thrills the heart, the scorn that dyes with shame the brow, Will be a long-forgotten dream, a hundred years from now. O patient hearts, that meekly bear your weary load of wrong! O earnest hearts, that bravely dare, and, striving, grow more strong! Press on till perfect peace is won; you'll never dream of how You struggled o'er life's thorny road, a hundred years from now. Grand, lofty souls, who live and toil that freedom, right, and truth Alone may rule the universe, for you is endless youth! When 'mid the blest with God you rest, the grateful land shall bow Above your clay in reverent love, a hundred years from now. Source: https://www.locserendipity.com/full/platformpiece00hawn_djvu.html https://www.locserendipity.com/full/platformpiece00hawn_djvu... (written in 1922)
• kuczmama 5y ago
  This is one of the most insightful articles I've ever read when it comes to predicting the future. If you are on the fence of whether or not to read this article I highly recommend you read it.
• paxys 5y ago
  Going to be "that guy" and say that almost everything he accurately predicted was already commonplace or on the rise in the 1920s. - Commercial flights had started a decade earlier. There were even successful transatlantic flights. - The women empowerment and feminism movement was in full swing. Women had just got the right to vote. A large percentage had careers and even unions. - Wireless radio and telegraph were established in most parts of the world. - Cinema, with sound and color, was already a thing. In fact he missed the mark on his actual predictions – food pills, paper mache furniture, no private dwellings, glass domed cities, nationalized industries in the US, no more opportunity in the US (funny since we are on a SV entrepreneurs forum right now).
  • rpowers 5y ago
    I agree. However, having just recently replaced a couch from a chain retailer, I can attest that they are pretty much made from paper mache.
  • otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    > paper mache furniture Wait till you find out what that Ikea crap is made of. :)
    • RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
      I once put a stool on a coffee table to put up a few curtains and the leg of the stool went through the surface of the coffee table. That surface is more or less paper mache by my book. Maybe the "paper" in the "mache" is not as finely ground and instead made of more granular wood chips, but its definitely made of a thin lamination of wood grounds held together by some adhesive. Its light as a feather though, so that's pretty nice.
      • rbanffy 5y ago
        I find IKEA's materials work remarkable - their materials are finely engineered to be light and pretty enough, and, at the same time, being sufficiently strong to bear the loads it's designed to. I'm writing this on an IKEA desk with 4 big monitors and 2 laptops, plus an assortment of external drives and docking stations. It's certainly not designed to bear my weight on 4 small spots, however, so I wouldn't even try that. It's not made of solid wood, but the furniture-equivalent of an F-22 wing.
• hoseja 5y ago
  "There will still be republics and monarchies; possibly, in 2022, the Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian kings may have fallen, but for a variety of reasons, either lack of advancement or practical inconvenience, we may expect still to find kings in Sweden, Jugo-Slavia, Greece, Rumania and Great Britain." Funny how among reasonable predictions this one is almost completely wrong, only 3/9 guessed right.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• never_a-pickle 5y ago
  Certain things the author got completely wrong (rise of racial politics, actual liberalism of thought), but his level-headed approach got him 75% of the way there. Though culturally he was eerily correct re: State-as-family.
  • gumby 5y ago
    > Though culturally he was eerily correct re: State-as-family That's not particularly surprising as it was one of the key philosophies of the age: the Russian revolution was only a few years old (and didn't spring from nowhere) while some of the competing philosophies, like anarchism and bimetallism, had burned out.
• nikkinana 5y ago
• dav_Oz 5y ago
  Somehow ironically the writer of that article, W L George, died 4 years later aged 43 on "pneumonia and heart failure" and "had been ill from the last twelve months" [0]. It reads like a high-school assignment in which "100 years from now" is entirely used as a narrative device and the author with his literary skill set kind of seemed bored with it and wants to just get over with. He basically mirrows the sentiment of his time by extrapolating - with hardly any spin of his own - the low hanging fruits: new rays, wireless technology, movies with sound & color, ease of housework (compressed papier mache: Ikea?), community dwellings, "servant problem", everything you need in a pill, city roofed with glass (his own spin?) ... His view that 1822 (Jefferson) is more dissimilar to 1922 than 2022 will be to 1922 (for a little girl) is weirdly off. He does not go into detail as to why and in which fundamental ways. "The more we discover the less is left" seems even more absurd and goes contrary to the open-endedness of the scientific inquiry (which he praised beforehand): "the more we discover the more questions arise". Finally when turning to political issues his narrating device serves only to illuminate his own (political/societal) views: emanicaption of women (from 20.000 years of slavery), tendency for socializations (not socialism!), (unconscious) nationalizing of important industries, "Anti-Trust Acts" in which the State limits profits and arbitrages between industries and workers, international trade in the hands of "controlled combines" (globalization) as a pacifying force, political conditions (nations) as a driver for war. Well, as a witness to WWI, WWII surely had to be "horrible beyond my conception". The potential of America to immense wealth ("most enterprising creature") away from a euro-centric (and partly his feminist views) are imho his most refreshing views. As a necessary flattery for the reader he goes on to predict an american flowering in literature and arts ("infinitely more than they are producing today" sounds more like an insult by an Englishman ;)). And by ending with "there will be no more things one can't say and things one can't think" and "a great liberalism of mind will prevail" I can only reply 100 years later with Goethe's 200 years old Wahlverwandschaften[1] and one prominent slogan of Occupy Wall Street: "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." ("Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein") [0]http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS19260408.2.125.1 http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS19260408.2.125... [1]http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Goethe,+Johann+Wolfgang/Romane/Die+Wahlverwandtschaften/Zweiter+Teil/F%C3%BCnftes+Kapitel http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Goethe,+Johann+Wolfgang/Roma...
• foobarbecue 5y ago
  Fascinating. I guess about one third of his predictions were correct. Eye-opening moments for me: - "white countries" - "radial energy" - "the servant problem" - no smoke in the house, "perhaps not even tobacco" - "the child is likely to be taken over by the State" - His vision of a house filled with frequently replaced disposable surfaces - "king of Jugo-Slavia" [will still reign] - "the American race [will become homogenous]" - "there will be no more opportunity [in America]" but that's a good thing
  • shawabawa3 5y ago
    > "the child is likely to be taken over by the State" I'd be interested what daycare and school looked like in 1922, because arguably childcare is mostly state run at this point
    • throwawaygh 5y ago
      In 1920, * the high school graduation rate was around 16%. (Up from below 10% in 1910!) * only 8 million women were in the labor force * Child labor laws either actually or functionally did not exist (the major federal laws were not passed in the 30s.) * The industrial revolution was in full swing, but huge swaths of the labor economy were still very agrarian. For the working class, early childhood care was provided by mothers and beyond that daycare/schooling was provided by the factories and farm fields.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    I wonder how he expected the American race to be homogeneous with segregation. He was probably implicitly meaning all the new European immigrants.
  • tempestn 5y ago
    I think the 'no more opportunity' point was largely correct. America is now developed in much the way England was in 1922. It does mean the limitless opportunity of 100 years ago is gone for the vast majority. But it also means the majority are far wealthier than they were. As he predicts, people only work 7-8 hours a day now, and often only 5 days a week. 50-60 hours a week was the norm in 1920. But at the same time, people do feel that lack of opportunity. For a prediction made 100 years out, I'd call it dead accurate.
• js2 5y ago
  The author, W.L. George, passed away in 1926, so he wouldn't live long enough to revisit his predictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._George
• yalogin 5y ago
  The popular culture in those days and may be even a few decades after that always predicted food intake to minimized to pills. Has there ever been attempt to do so? I mean any company or university attempting to deliver the same nutrients and satisfaction in a much reduced form factor?
  • progval 5y ago
    Kind of, but still much larger than pills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(meal_replacement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(meal_replacement)
• tdeck 5y ago
  I vividly remember reading this book as a 90s kid with predictions about what the home would look like in 2020: https://y2kaestheticinstitute.tumblr.com/post/143836250779/virtual-home-in-2020-eyewitness-books-future https://y2kaestheticinstitute.tumblr.com/post/143836250779/v...
• dahart 5y ago
  > They will have rebelled against long hours; the chances are that in 2022 few people will work more than seven hours a day, if as much Bertrand Russell also famously predicted this. I believe I’ve read that in the 1800’s people were predicting industrialization would do away with labor. People are still predicting this today, with the advent of Machine Learning that’s good enough to automate things like driving. Will this prediction ever come true, or is there some kind of human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter what we invent?
  • krupan 5y ago
    "Will this prediction ever come true, or is there some kind of human nature that is going to keep us grinding away no matter what we invent?" Seems abundantly clear to me that there indeed is something in our nature that keeps us grinding. I do hope that we at least continue to increase the freedom to choose what and when we grind
    • jlawson 5y ago
      It's not in our nature, it's in the rewards we desire. We desire the best mate possible. No industrial or computer advance has (yet) provided any of us with better mates. Mates are as scarce as they were hundreds and thousands of years ago. Mates choose each other according to relative status. By definition, there is no way we can increase everyone's relative status. So the reason people grind as hard as they used to is that they're facing the same incentives and barriers: For the mate you want, you have to grind your way up the status hierarchy (or at least enough to avoid falling). Competition is just as stiff as it was in 1950 or 1850, or 1000 BC. Things will only truly change in this respect when we invent artificial ways to satisfy peoples' desire for mates. However, this won't happen soon. Sexbots are only a small part of it; a mate is much more.
      • dahart 5y ago
        I guess the immediate question I’d have in response to that hypothesis is: if seeking a mate is what’s leading people to grind, why doesn’t that behavior taper off after marriage?
• wuliwong 5y ago
  From a quick reading of the entire article, I came away impressed with how much was quite accurate.
• askin4it 5y ago
  the two preceding pages...situations wanted and help wanted https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=85&r=-0.024,0.087,0.47,0.188,0 https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=... https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=86 https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Animats 5y ago
  "There was a time when the mistress of the house, having given instructions to the servants, need do nothing at all. Of course, the servants had to slave, day in and day out." Doordash. Uber. Grubhub. TaskRabbit. All require an underclass. Is this progress?
• krupan 5y ago
  I was just laughing at the idea of glassed in cities with all our gas powered cars with my wife, but then I realized that if the cities were well ventilated/filtered that could result in an air quality improvement for a lot of places
• hereforphone 5y ago
  You know what they call a quarter pounder in France?
• standardUser 5y ago
  I have always had a strong almost visceral dislike of people attempting to predict the future with even a hint of confidence, so I really appreciate this author starting off by saying "don't worry guys, this is just for fun".
• dznodes 5y ago
  This is so accurate it seems almost fake. Who has written something similar about the next 100 years? Preferably with as much positivity and wisdom as this gentleman had.
• rkagerer 5y ago
  I have a vision of walls, paper and hangings made of more or less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or taping along the edges. Hah, he basically predicted Ikea!
• thecosas 5y ago
  Who's up for writing about what 2122 will look like?
• mcsoft 5y ago
  Some predictions were super accurate (i.e. Europe to America in 8 hours), some failed (lunch in 4 pills), but, due to immense optimism of human nature, one just couldn't envision the most influencing events of XX century - the rise of totalitarianism resulting in World War II and all its disasters. Something I can't escape thinking about when reading modern predictions.
• neycoda 5y ago
  They didn't predict that I wouldn't be able read their article on my phone.
• shuntress 5y ago
  The more things change the they stay the same. It's really interesting to read this, genuinely prescient, starkly logical analysis that seems quite liberal and self-aware while also deeply soaked in un-acknowledged bias. The time this was written was around the peak of the suffrage movement a couple years after the 19th amendment. That, perhaps, contributes to the placating tone in the author's description of how little progress the movement will have made by 2022. I think especially noteworthy is the apparent blind spot towards the speed of information. He spends a lot of space articulating the physical characteristics of a City of Tomorrow but no consideration of what it might mean to quickly and easily read anything that has ever been published. Really interesting article. EDIT: Another note regarding his whole segment on work, production and leisure: he seems to only conceive of work as labor. Where, for example, an additional hour spent shoveling coal means another hour's worth of shoveled coal while forgetting to consider the possibility of "critical thinking" production where an additional hour spent working does not necessarily mean an additional hour spent being productive. A good prediction here would have touched on what careers in more "creative" production might look like.
• PotatoPancakes 5y ago
  Geez, is this really the best OCR we have in 2022? This is the text generated by the OCR on that site: 'p========r^ SECTION SEVEN CL By W. L. George THERE is a good old rule which bids us never prophesy unless we know, but, all the same, when one cannot prophesy one may guess, especially if one is sure of being out of the way when the reckoning comes. Therefore it is without anxiety, that I suggest a picture of this world a hundred years hence, and venture as my first guess thrt the world at that time would be remarkable to one of our ghosts, not so much because it was so different as because it was so similar. In the main the changes which we may expect must be brought about by science. It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same. From which the reader may conclude that I do not expect anything startling in the way of scientific discoverv. That is not the case; I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms. The-little girl at Grand Central is a blase child; to her these things are commonplace; the year 2022 would have to produce something very startling to interest her ghost. The sad thing about discovery is that it works toward its own extinction, and that the more- we discover the less there is left. % w It does not follow that, scientifically, the year 2022 should fail to be amazing. I suspect that commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace. The passenger steamer will survive on the coasts. but it will have disappeared on the main routes, and will have been replaced by flying convoys, which should cover the distance between London and New York in about twelve hours. As I am anxious that the reader should not look upon me as a visionary, I would point out that in an airplane collision which happened recently a British passenger plane was traveling at 180 miles an hour, which speed would have brought it across the Atlantic in eighteen hours. It is therefore quite conceivable that America may become separated from Europe by only eight hours. The problem is mainly one of artificial heating and ventilation to enable the aeronauts to survive. The same cause will affect the railroads, which at that time will probably have ceased to carry passengers except for suburban traffic. Railroads may continue to handle freight, but it may be that even this will be taken from them by road traffic, because the automobile does not have to carry the enormous overhead charges of tracks. Certainly food, mails and all light goods will be taken over from the railroads by road trucks. As for the horse, it will probably no longer be bred In white countries. The people of the year 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky: it Is practically certain that wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system long before the century is done. Possibly, too, power may travel through the air when means are found to prevent enormous voltages being suddenly discharged in the wrong place. Coal will not be exhausted, but our reserves will be seriously depleted, and so will those of oil. One of the world dangers a century hence will be a shortage of fuel, but It is likely that by that time a ureal ueai 01 power win ue ooiHineo irom tides, from the sun, probably from radium and other forms of radial energy, while It may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed. If It is true that matter Is kept together by forces known as electrons. It Is possible that we shall know how to dls< ?perse matter so as to release the electron as a force. This force would last as long as matter, thefofore as long as the earth itself. I The movies will be more attractive, as long before 2022 they will have been re* i THE I P ma V ' placed by the kinephone, which now exists only in the laboratory. That is the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and spaak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only not need to know how to smile but also how to talk. Hna mttrVif AvianH i ? A ? fi ? i i ?1 vr nn tKa V/UO "HftUt V<AtVUU 1UUC nunc 1J uu tuo number of inventions which ought to exist and will exist, but the reader can think of them for himself, and it is more interesting to ask ourselves what will be the appearance of our cities a hundred years hence. To my mind they will offer a mixed outlook, because mankind never tears anything down completely to build up something else; it erects the new while retaining the old; thus, many buildings now standing will be preserved. It is conceivable that the Capitol at Washington, many of the universities and churches will be standing a hundred yearB hence, and that they will, almost unaltered, be preserved by tradition. Also, many private dwellings will survive and will be inhabited by Individual families. I think that they will have passed through the cooperative stage, which may be expected fifty or sixty years nence, wnen ine servant pruoiem nas oecome completely unmanageable and when private dwellings organize themselves to engage staffs to cook, clean, and mend for the groups. That cooperative stage will be the last kick of the private mistress who wants to retain in her household some sort of slave. In 2022 she will have been bent by circumstances, but sh'e will have recovered her private dwelling, being served for seven hours a day by an orderly. The woman who becomes an orderly will be as well paid as If she were a stenographer, will wear her own clothes, be called "Miss," belong to her trade union and work under union rulea. Naturally the work of the household, which is being reduced day by day, will in 2022 be a great deal lighter. I believe that most of the cleaning required to-day in a house will have been done away with. In the first place, through the disappearance of coal in all places where electricity is not made there will be no more smoke, perhaps not even that of tobacco. In the second place I have a vision of walls, furniture and hangings made of more or less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or taping along the edges. Thus, instead of \ VEW YO GAZINE NEW YORK, SUNDAY, Witt^L bB
• raskelof 5y ago
  So to the interesting question, what will the world be like in 2122?
• tasha0663 5y ago
  One thing the author didn't foresee: the persistence of cat memes https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=96 https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=...
• tasha0663 5y ago
  There's a lovely ad for malt extract tonic (wink wink) on page 19 https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=19 https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1922-05-07/ed-1/?sp=... Totally not beer!
• xkgt 5y ago
  I expected to see a bunch of failed predictions but most of the stuff is surprisingly accurate. I see some commenters remark that these were conservative predictions and that most of the technologies existed in some form in 1922. But that such incremental advancement is more representative of progress than disruptive changes. I feel the short term disruptive development post WWII has clouded our perception of long term technical progress due to recency bias. I suppose that is why most of the Sci-fi predictions post 1960 feels wildly inaccurate about the current decade than predictions from 100 years ago.