John Elfreth Watkins predicted… In 1900, an American civil engineer called John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions about what the world would be like in 2000. How did he do? As is customary at the start of a new year, the media have been full of predictions about what may happen in the months ahead. But a much longer forecast made in 1900 by a relatively unknown engineer has been recirculating in the past few days. In December of that year, at the start of the 20th Century, John Elfreth Watkins wrote a piece published on page eight of an American womens magazine, Ladies Home Journal, entitled What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years. He began the article with the words: These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible, explaining that he had consulted the countrys greatest institutions of science and learning for their opinions on 29 topics. Watkins was a writer for the Journals sister magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, based in Indianapolis. The Post brought this article to a modern audience last week when its history editor Jeff Nilsson wrote a feature praising Watkins accuracy. It was picked up and caused some excitement on Twitter. So what did Watkins get right - and wrong? One of his predictions was the coming of digital colour photography Watkins did not, of course, use the word digital or spell out precisely how digital cameras and computers would work, but he accurately predicted how people would come to use new photographic technology. A scan of the original article can be found online Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.... photographs will reproduce all of natures colours. This showed major foresight, says Mr Nilsson. When Watkins was making his predictions, it would have taken a week for a picture of something happening in China to make its way into Western papers. People thought photography itself was a miracle, and colour photography was very experimental, he says. The idea of having cameras gathering information from opposite ends of the world and transmitting them - he wasnt just taking a present technology and then looking to the next step, it was far beyond what anyone was saying at the time. Patrick Tucker from the World Future Society, based in Maryland in the US, thinks Watkins might even be hinting at a much bigger future breakthrough. Photographs will be telegraphed reads strikingly like how we access information from the web, says Mr Tucker.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 21:08:08 +0000
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