Predicting the Year 2000 in 1900

Following up form my posts on H.G. Wells predictive abilities (here and here), the Washington Post has an interesting article on a series of artworks from 1900 depicting what the artists thought life might be like in the year 2000, entitled rather unimaginatively What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like.

The pictures are, of course, interesting not only for what they got correct, but also for what they got wrong and why.

Many of the pictures show increased mechanization, reflecting the rise and rise of mechanization at the time. Many were applied to the service industries, such as what the Washington Post describes as "a precursor to the new robot vacuum, the iRobot Roomba vacuum" in the diagram to the left.

To an economist, the main thing that is surprising about this picture is that the mechanized vacuum operates alongside a maid, as opposed to having replaced the maid. The development of labor saving machines for use in home production is probably one of the most transformative set of innovations of the 20th Century and would appear to have played a large role in the rise of women working outside of the home.

Not all of the envisaged mechanized service sector inventions have come to pass. The next picture shows a mechanized barbershop. The fact that this has not occurred in practice may reflect the fact that certain services need to be more precisely individually tailored than others.

We might be getting closer to the day when we have, as shown in the next picture, almost fully automated and almost instantaneous production of tailored clothing. Certainly, taking advantage of improved telecommunications, people today can take advantage of tailoring that is offshored to low labor cost countries.

The mechanization of the agricultural sector is also commonly depicted. This was a very accurate prediction, although the specific details were a little off.

We certainly see today the mechanized harvesting of crops, depicted in the next picture. The incubation of chickens is also, I think, now regularly mechanized, although it does not seem to work as instantaneously as depicted in the following picture.


The second last picture is of something that might reasonably regarded as an early conception of a mobile home. Whether this was viewed as a permanent home for the very rich, or a summer fancy for the middle classes is not clear. But it clearly tapped into the increased interest and affordability of travel at the time.

Lastly, a surprising number of the images contain rather fanciful depictions of recreational activities underwater, as shown in the last picture of an underwater croquet game. At first glance this may seem surprising. But it makes a lot of sense once it is noted that France played a central role in the development of diving as both a professional activity and as a hobby. For example, the French engineers Auguste Denayrouze and Benoît Rouquayrol invented the under water regulator in 1864.

In the picture, the people seem to be using self contained underwater breathing apparatus. As there are no bubbles depicted, it looks like a closed circuit system, perhaps along the lines of that built by the Englishman Henry Fleuss in 1878. The first open-circuit scuba system was not devised until 1925 (by the Frenchman Yves Le Prieur).

More H.G. Wells Predicting the Future

In 2009, Google celebrated what would have been H.G. Wells 134th birthday with a series of doodles. This prompted a number of magazines to run articles about the predictions he had made that had come true, as well as those that had not. I came across a number of these as I writing yesterday's post, of which the following are a sample:

1. HG Wells on Google: which of his predictions came true? The Telegraph, 22nd September, 2009.
2. H.G. Wells Predictions Ring True, 143 Years Later by Richard A. Lovett, National Geographic, 21st September, 2009.
3. H.G. WELLS: 9 Predictions That Have, And Haven't, Come True. by Richard A. Lovett, National Geographic, 21st September, 2009.

Here is a list of his predictions which arguably have come true:

1. Nuclear weapons: The World Set Free (1914) Wells envisioned "atomic bombs" that could explode continuously using the power of radioactivity. He also foresaw the problem of proliferation, warning that a global government was the only way of preventing nation states from destroying themselves with nuclear weapons.
2. Moon landing: The First Men in the Moon (1901). Although the moon turned out not to be populated by a subterranean civilisation of Selenites.
3. Genetic engineering: The Island Of Dr Moreau (1896). Dr Moreau's monstrous experiments with vivisection, creating human-animal hybrids, are reminiscent of the hybrid interspecies embryos known as "chimeras" routinely conceived for medical research. Modern scientists have created glowing animals.
4. Lasers: The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells's Martian had a Heat-Ray, which fired streams of energy powerful enough to set fire to flesh and incinerate buildings. Laser weaponry was a central element of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" plan to shoot down nuclear missiles in space, and the U.S. military developed (in 2007) a so-called heat-ray gun that uses an invisible beam of microwave radiation to cause a burning sensation meant to help disperse crowds. The so-called Active Denial System stands at the ready at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.
5. Second World War: The Shape of Things to Come (1933) Wells correctly predicted that a global conflict would break out within a decade, erupting in Eastern Europe before sucking in all the world powers. He was not alone in forecasting conflict during the volatile 1930s, but his descriptions of carpet bombing raids and fear of gas attacks proved prescient.
6. Automatic doors. Wells door slid upward, into the ceiling, which is impractical as it requires room for the door to move into.
7. Cell phones. In The Shape of Things to Come, Wells depicted a wireless wrist intercom that had many cell phone-like features. His 1923 book Men Like Gods, imagined a future in which people communicated almost entirely by wireless telephones and voice mail.

While here is a list of others that have not come true (yet!):

1. Invisibility: The Invisible Man (1897). Scientist are developing the technology to build invisibility cloaks.
2. Super-highways/sidewalks. In When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) Wells described 300-foot-wide highways that moved like giant conveyor belts, complete with seats and refreshment kiosks. Such an invention is a far cry from today's moving walkways, often found in airports.

Wells was also an astute social commentator, even if his fears for future society have not proven true. However, as science fiction writer Jerry Oltion points out

One of the jobs of science fiction writers is not so much to predict the future as to prevent the future. In that regard, Wells did a very good job.

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.