The 23 June 1911 issue of the Miami Metropolis featured predictions by Thomas Edison about life in America one hundred years hence. Here's a selection from of prophecies of "the Wizard", as the author refers to Edison:
What do you think life will be like in the year 2111?
http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-for-the-year-2011-1911.html via Geekosystem | Photo: Library of Congress
But the traveler of the future, says a writer in Answers, will largely scorn such earth crawling. 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.
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 cradle; his 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.
What do you think life will be like in the year 2111?
http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-for-the-year-2011-1911.html via Geekosystem | Photo: Library of Congress
Comments (53)
Space travel isn't faring too well and so we will learn to produce lush plant life in our deserts so we can inhabit them. Perhaps we'll have sea worlds, too, but I rather think we'll build up before we build out in the ocean.
Because people need to work, robots won't be as popular as people have imagined, although housework will definitely be easier to manage through clever, time saving inventions.
Shopping will be done through some kind of Internet system, and because the world will be so crowded, we'll all be more home oriented. In fact, we might have more family businesses operated out of the home as people did in the middle ages, but they'll be much more modern and efficient.
We'll still have governments and loyalties to our government, but we'll all have become so self sufficient that we won't have as much need for wars. Our interpersonal relations will start becoming more important than our relation to our governments. Ponderous government systems such as Fascism and Communism will seem even more cumbersome than they do now.
Clothes won't be scientific and efficient. They more advanced we become, the more we crave color and adornment.