The washable metallic, retroprefab Lustron House

“In 1947, Chicago industrialist and inventor Carl Strandlund, who had worked with constructing prefabricated gas stations, obtained a multi-million-dollar Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan to manufacture steel houses with porcelain-enamel-coated panels.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, how would you have predicted the technological future? In the US, you would have had a sense of progress, of steam trains and the first high-rise buildings, of mass production and falling prices. The Civil War would recall the horrors of mass combat. Science would be improving agriculture and medicine, while mass education would be improving the whole population. Morse code, the telephone and the moving picture camera would point to the importance of communication devices.

Fifty years later, we knew that technology gave power to monsters as well as angels. That the human mind and the economy remained dangerously unpredictable.

Fifty years later again, we know much more about second order effects of change. We can see the environment suffer and the weather system begin to convulse. We think we understand much more about economics, but we fear the local effects of globalism. Computers are causing changes so large we simply can’t see them.

It is a brave pundit who would predict the future now with any confidence. But in 1902, a year before the first aeroplane, The Ladies Home Journal published a set of predictions about the world in 2002.

It is exactly right that I found an image for this post about a mass-produced house built from the panels that make electric ovens. Here are the most endearing predictions:

“The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare…

… There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits…

… Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express. There will be cigar-shaped electric locomotives hauling long trains of cars. Cars will, like houses, be artificially cooled….

….. Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.

There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth…

…. Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. [And] will reproduce all of Natures colors…

…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. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient…

.. Strawberries as Large as Apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence…

…. Storekeepers who expose food to air breathed out by patrons or to the atmosphere of the busy streets will be arrested with those who sell stale or adulterated produce…

… There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers…

… . A university education will be free to every man and woman…

… Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. …. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl”…

.. Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box. Automatic instruments reproducing original airs exactly will bring the best music to the families of the untalented..

.. Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth’s hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300…

… Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles…

…. Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today… Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons. The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed…

…. The living body will to all medical purposes be transparent. Not only will it be possible for a physician to actually see a living, throbbing heart inside the chest, but he will be able to magnify and photograph any part of it. This work will be done with rays of invisible light…

… There will be no wild animals except in menageries….

.. Fast electric ships, crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, will go from New York to Liverpool in two days. The bodies of these ships will be built above the waves. They will be supported upon runners, somewhat like those of the sleigh…”

Hunting for an image, I found Pruned, which is about “landscape architecture and related fields.” Trevie posted a wonderful selection of pics about imaginary futures, which came in turn from “Fabio Femino’s gargantuan futurological collection.

The article has been scanned here; I have taken the text from the version on Museum of Hoaxes; the original connection came from Bifurcated Rivets.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 12:14 am and is filed under entertainments, history. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.