The year is 1900. Only a very few people own a car and horse-drawn carriages are still favoured for getting about.
An American gentleman called Mr. John Watkins picks up his pen - probably the sort which you had to keep dipping into an inkwell - and begins to write.
"What may happen in the next hundred years..." Yes our Mr. Watkins is predicting the future. How well did he do? Judge for yourself as I list a few of the things which he jotted down way back then, one hundred and twelve years ago.
Colour photos: "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 nature's colors."
Mobile phones: "Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn."
Supermarkets selling pre-prepared meals: "Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishment similar to our bakeries of today."
Television: "Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span."
Express trains: "Trains will run two miles a minute normally. Express trains one hundred and fifty miles per hour."
He wasn't far off the mark was he?
How do you think the world will have changed a hundred years from now?
An American gentleman called Mr. John Watkins picks up his pen - probably the sort which you had to keep dipping into an inkwell - and begins to write.
"What may happen in the next hundred years..." Yes our Mr. Watkins is predicting the future. How well did he do? Judge for yourself as I list a few of the things which he jotted down way back then, one hundred and twelve years ago.
Colour photos: "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 nature's colors."
Mobile phones: "Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn."
Supermarkets selling pre-prepared meals: "Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishment similar to our bakeries of today."
Television: "Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span."
Express trains: "Trains will run two miles a minute normally. Express trains one hundred and fifty miles per hour."
He wasn't far off the mark was he?
How do you think the world will have changed a hundred years from now?
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