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from
The Kansas City Star, March 6, 1999
Futurists Have a Mixed Record in Forecasting Human
Progress
by Rick Montgomery
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It's 1999 and, yes, rats still
exist.
 A century ago the futurists figured
otherwise. An  optimistic
and self-assured bunch, they issued papers, gave speeches and sketched
diagrams that dared to portray life "a hundred years hence,"
or at the close of the century they were entering.
When the Ladies' Home Journal joined
the chorus in December 1900, it predicted this for the year 2000:
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Insect screens will be unnecessary. Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches
will have been practically exterminated. . . The extermination of the horse and
its stable will reduce the house-fly. . . . There will be no wild animals except
in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. |
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It is worth noting that this report
and several others of the era proved accurate—if rather clumsy—in
forecasting the advent of TV, of airships and mass-produced cars, of air
conditioning ("cold air from spigots"), of skyscrapers, of school
buses and of the physical-fitness phenomenon.
Many envisioned America at the dawn
of the third millennium as an electric utopia
void of hunger and wars.
"Life in those times will be
as nearly a holiday as it is possible to make it," the Brooklyn Daily
Eagle asserted on the last Sunday of 1899. "Work will be reduced
to a minimum by machinery. Nobody who is anybody (will lack) his automobile
and his air yacht."
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The
dreams defined the times. People at the turn of the century were just
learning the complex art of telephoning. A burst of other innovations
had them bedazzled:
electric lights; moving pictures; phonographs; the earliest motor cars.
By 1903 the Wright brothers' flying machine would bolster the argument
that anything was possible by the end of the 20th century.
"What these forecasters ended
up with was a picture of their own community perfected," said Carolyn
Marvin, author of When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Communication
in the Late 19th Century.
Skeptics had their say, too.
In 1899 the British scientist William
Thomson declared: "Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines
are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax." As for the submarine,
even science fiction author H. G. Wells said he couldn't imagine such
a vessel "doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering
at sea."
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"Futurists Have a Mixed Record in Forecasting Human Progress" by Rick Montgomery from The Kansas City Star, March 6, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by The Kansas City Star. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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