H.G. Wells Predicting the Future

In 1932, H.G. Wells published a short story "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper" in which a man obtains a copy of the London Evening Standard from November 10th, 1971. You can read the story courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

The story describes the response of Brownlow, who

found himself surveying a real evening newspaper, which was dealing, so far as he could see at the first onset, with the affairs of another world.

What was this world like? How did H.G. Wells imagine the future? Some details he got exactly correct, even if he was off on the timing of when they would arrive. The newspaper was in color with color photographs. The fashions displayed people with wearable gadgets. Birth rates have declined. Animal extinctions continue (although thankfully not gorilla's as of yet).

In other respects he was quite wrong. Although geothermal energy is making progress, it is not true even today that "The Age of Combustion has Ended!" Body clothing has not been reduced. Although the Soviet Union has fallen, The U.K. and U.S.A. remain. Wells was wrong to think of a world with a supranational government in which

the great game of sovereign states will be over.

Perhaps most laughably to my mind, although perhaps I should be more depressed than amused by this, Wells was wrong to think that newspapers and public discourse would have become much more sophisticated:

There was much more space given to scientific work and to inventions than is given in any contemporary paper. There were diagrams and mathematical symbols, he says, but he did not look into them very closely because he could not get the hang of them. "Frightfully highbrow, some of it," he said. 

A more intelligent world for our grandchildren evidently, and also, as the pictures testified, a healthier and happier world.

That Wells was unable to do better predicting the future is not at all surprising. In fact, I am quite impressed with how well he did. As he points out himself, some inventions are so sudden and so transforming it is almost impossible to predict their occurrence or their implications:

After all, in 1831 very few people thought of railway or steamship travel, and in 1871 you could already go round the world in eighty days by steam, and send a telegram in a few minutes to nearly every part of the earth. Who would have thought of that in 1831? Revolutions in human life, when they begin to come, can come very fast. Our ideas and methods change faster than we know.

The blog Futility Closet points out that on the actual November 10th, 1971, the Evening Standard ran the headline “The Prophecy H.G. Wells Made About Tonight’s Standard”. They even tried to track down the supposed intended recipient of the newspaper from the story: a Mr. Evan O’Hara. Unfortunately, they found no trace of him.