Predictions from 100 years ago

What happens if we relook at predictions from 100 years ago?

Futurists usually aren’t judged on the accuracy of their predictions, and people rarely revisit the predictions many years later. Futurists can be wrong and unaccountable; just like meteorologists…

The exception might be Ray Kurzweil who some have claimed to have a stunning 86% accuracy rate. Other disagree with this claim, citing a significantly lower 7% accuracy. In fact, most well-known futurists seem to have less than a 10% accuracy rate.

I don’t think meteorologists would last very long if they only got the weather right once every two weeks.

Archibald Low’s predictions from 100 years ago seem to have done significantly better. Archibald “Archy” Montgomery Low, born in 1888, was an engineer, physicist, inventor, and prolific author. Low is credited with the first unmanned plane (aka drone), the first electrically-steered rocket, and worked on the first televisions.

In the 1925 book The Future and supporting articles, Low predicted “a day in the life of a man of the future.” While Low’s predictions were harshly judged at the time as “such horrors” and “ruthlessly imaginative,” many of them have stood the test of 100 years of time, including:

• Being woken up by a “radio alarm clock”
  At the time, people were woken by a ‘knocker upper’ – a person who went from house to house tapping their long wooden stick on windowpanes.
• Communications by “personal radio set” and “automatic telephones”
  Low essentially predicted the mobile phone and desk phones with stored numbers, eliminating the mistakes from the then prevalent rotary phones.
• Having meals “with loudspeaker news and television glimpses of events”
  It’s not so much that the TV invaded the dining room but rather that meals became more casual and moved into the parlor and living rooms.
• Relying on “moving stairways” and “moving pavements”
  By predicting escalators and moving sidewalks, Low suggested we wouldn’t have to extend energy on unnecessary items.

Low also forecasts the use of renewable energy from wind and water:

Of course, not all of Low’s predictions have come true: he suggested we all would be wearing synthetic felt one-piece suits and hats!

Nonetheless, the predictions from 100 years have been surprisingly accurate and most have come true. I wonder how many of the predictions from today will be true in the next 100 years…