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Millennium Predictions: Past Thinking About the Future

January 4, 2001

Flying houses. Talking dishwashers. Undergarments turned into candy. That's what people 100 years ago thought we would be enjoying today.

Far from the predictions of a tarot card reader or psychic hotline, these forecasts came from engineers, scientists and writers who study social and technological trends to predict what daily life might be like in the future. They call themselves "futurists."

For more than a century, futurists have looked at the year 2000 as a turning point for human civilization. Maybe it's because the year ends in zeros, or because the turn of the millennium is so much grander than the rollover of a mere century. According to Laura Lee, author of the book Bad Predictions, 150 novels were set in the year 2000 between 1888 and 1900 alone.

Predictions for 2000

If all past predictions had come true, we would have things like self-cleaning clothes or underwater cities.

Some predictions from the past were correct but the inventions, like talking cars and video telephones, didn't turn out to be as popular as once thought.

Two of the most famous novels predicting our future were George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Published in 1949 as a warning against the dangers of a totalitarian government, Orwell's book described a future government called "Big Brother" that constantly rewrote history and watched citizens' every move on TV cameras that couldn't be turned off.

Huxley's 1932 book envisioned a freer world where everyone takes mood-enhancing drugs and babies are concocted in giant laboratories.

In 1887, Edward Bellamy wrote a book called Looking Backward describing life in the 20th century. He correctly predicted major advances in transportation, including air travel, but had some other ideas that didn't pan out, like houses grouped in communities with shared kitchens and laundry rooms, and trains pushed by fast-moving air in tubes.

The Ladies' Home Journal published a collection of predictions in 1900 by journalist John Elfreth Watkins Jr. He was suprisingly correct about air conditioning and direct-dial long distance telephoning, but wrong about a free university education and "strawberries as large as apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence."

A 1950 Popular Mechanics article predicted that homes of the future would have plastic furniture, rugs, drapes and floors that could be cleaned with a garden hose. It also forecast plastic plates that would melt in hot water and wash down the drain.

One of the magazine's more interesting predictions was that we would use paper tablecloths and wear thin rayon underwear that chemical factories would buy to convert into candy. (It certainly gives new meaning to Bart Simpson's favorite phrase "Eat My Shorts!")

In 1951, inventor and designer Buckminster Fuller came up with an idea to use the natural rotation of the Earth for easier travel. A man-made space ring would encircle the Earth above the equator. People would go up to the ring and ride in it while the Earth rotated beneath them. When their destination came into view below, they would descend.

The Future With Technology

The futuristic displays at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair lured visitors with visions of a bright future aided by technology.

General Motors' "Futurama" exhibit showed a city 10,000 feet under the ocean reached by atomic submarines. It also featured a lunar colony with all-terrain vehicles for exploration and pumps sending ocean water to deserts. Cars drove themselves along automated highways, as drivers let computers set their speed and course.

At General Electric's "Progressland," visitors witnessed the "creation of a miniature sun" where nuclear reactors would generate unlimited amounts of energy to power all future inventions.

In 1966, Arthur C. Clarke wrote in Vogue magazine that houses would fly by 2001. He thought entire communities would head south for the winter or move to new locations for a change of scenery.

Many scholars of the past believed that the advances in technology would make life easier, and that by 2000, most adults would work only a few hours every week. Most daily tasks would be automated and computers or robots would be intelligent enough to complete them.

Although robots do help now with many things like making cars, they are not as popular as many science fiction books and movies once led people to believe. They thought robots would be helping students with homework, doing housework and thinking independently enough to write books or music. (Where's a good homework robot when you need one?)

Bad Predictions

Here are a few other bad predictions from Laura Lee's book:

• "Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments," Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus, A.D. 10.
  
  
• "Despite the trend to compactness and lower costs, it is unlikely everyone will have his own computer any time soon," Reporter Stanley Penn, The Wall Street Journal, 1966
  
  
• "By the turn of this century, we will live in a paperless society," Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, 1986.

Now the year 2000 is almost over, and current futurists are writing about a more powerful Internet, a longer human lifespan (up to 300 years), superhighways connecting distant cities like Hong Kong and Paris, and lunar housing as an escape from an overcrowded Earth.

What do you think? What do you think will the future will hold in ten years? In 100 years? Write us and we'll post your responses.

-- By Samara Aberman, NewsHour Extra