In December of 1900, a civil engineer named John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. wrote an article for The Ladies Home Journal titled “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years” and his predictions put most futurists to shame. Nostradamus had to write gibberish to get generous interpretations of his vague events, Watkins went on the record with specifics and was spooky in his accuracy.
Years ago, Wired used to publish an annual issue named The Wired World In 20-- where everyone from me to Richard Branson to James Dyson would try and predict short-term events. I got none right, we are not 3-D printing replacement organs from our own stem cells or preventing damage from heart attack reperfusion, which makes the Watkins achievement even more impressive.
“These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now."
Then he predicted DoorDash and digital cameras and fighter jets. He said horse cavalry would give way to motorized war machines - tanks.
He predicted we'd have 350,000,000 or more Americans, we have 349,000,000 that we know about right now because he didn't predict birth control. He predicted we'd be two inches or more taller - the average man was 5'7" in 1900 and 5'9" in 2000. He predicted that all schools would have gym class and everyone would have access to recreational exercise as adults. He predicted tractors and most of modern agriculture and that horses would be luxuries for the wealthy rather than necessities.
He predicted silent pistols, spy satellites, live television events, and digital cameras that made images available immediately.
He didn't get everything right. He predicted air conditioning would be everywhere. Even in Europe. That hasn't happened. And the letters C, Q, and X have not been scuttled. We could easily do without Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, they're useless disease vectors with no ecological importance, but no one could have predicted environmental groups run by predatorts who used lawsuits to undermine science from creating pest control so New York City is still overrun with cockroaches.
The Danish tradition of eating strawberries the size of apples at Christmas dinner never took hold, but there is still time.
Overall, he remains one of the most impressive prognosticators in world history.
