Movies Will Replace Textbooks (1922)

The 2006 book Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change by Bob Seidensticker is a fascinating read. From page 103:

Schools have had a longstanding immunity against the introduction of new technologies. In 1922 Thomas Edison predicted that movies would replace textbooks. In 1945 one forecaster imagined radios as common as blackboards in classrooms. In the 1960s, B.F. Skinner predicted that teaching machines and programmed instruction would double the amount of information students could learn in a given time. Filmstrips and other audiovisual aids were fads thirty years ago, and the television, now seen as a supplier of brain candy, once had a sterling reputation as an education machine.

See also:
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading On Screen (1923)
Movies to be Produced in Every Home (1925)

Animals Must 'Pay Their Way' (1926)

It is astonishing how many predictions of the early 20th century assumed animals (that is, all animals) would eventually be extinct simply because they were not needed by humans. A piece by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in the December, 1900 Ladies Home Journal predicted that there would be, "no wild animals except in menageries."

The article above, from the November 11, 1926 Galveston Daily News (Galveston, TX), operated under similar assumptions. Titled, "To Find Some Use For Every Wild Animal," the piece assumed that in the future animals would have to justify their existence by proving their usefulness to humankind. That's a far cry from today when we're trying to save polar bears, which everyone knows are lazy and deceitful. I mean really, what has a polar bear done for you lately?

[Scientists] predict that the day will come when the wild creatures of the earth will have to pay their way or become as extinct as many forms of animal life have in the dim distances of the past.

Unless an animal can contribute something definite to human life - food to be eaten, clothes to be worn, labor to lighten the burden of man - then his doom is sealed and the last of his tribe will one day pass out of the picture.

See also:
What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years (Ladies Home Journal, 1900)
Animals of 2076 (1977)
Animal Food Abandoned (The Anaconda Standard, 1914)
French Prints Show Year 2000 (circa 1910)

Movies to be Produced in Every Home (1925)

The September 5, 1925 Charleston Gazette (Charleston, WV) ran an article titled, "Expect Movies to be Produced in Every Home," in which Cecil B. DeMille predicts not only home movies of the future, but the rise of the amateur filmmaker as a force in the film industry.

Alongside D.W. Griffith's 1923 prediction of future private movie libraries, it is quite astounding how forward-thinking the film industry was in the 1920s.

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 4 - Even as father now slices the beef roast and Sister Mary plays the piano, so may motion pictures in the future be produced in every American home.

This is the belief of several leading American producers.

"It is not at all beyond the range of possibility, and to me it seems probable, that within the next 20 years some householder with absolutely no studio training will produce a screen masterpiece, with no stage except that of his own parlor, dining room or bedroom." Cecille DeMille, the Los Angeles producer, declared today in an exclusive interview.

Explains His Theory

In explanation of his theory, DeMille said:

"Slow film and slow camera lenses requiring a great quantity of light have been the sole reason until now that especially equipped studios have had a monopoly on the making of photoplays.

"Very elaborate and expensive electrical equipment has in the past always been necessary to produce a great flood of light. Lenses and aim have not been developed to a point where they can pick up a moving figures in ordinary light and still give the sense of depth necessary is good photography.

"That time is rapidly passing. Every day better lenses are being developed and every day some new chemical is found which increases the speed of our film.

"It will not be long until anyone will be able to make motion pictures in no more than ordinary indoor daylight. And when that time comes we will find cameramen utilizing daylight to give far better results than at present. For such limited light will do away altogether with sharp lines and shadows, which often mar pictures taken in too dazzling an illumination.

Use to Be Widespread

"With the necessity of powerful lighting done away with, motion pictures can then be taken in every American home and the motion picture camera used in just the same fashion as kodaks are today.

"So one sees that as a prairie woman in Nebraska may produce the greatest novel of the year or a man in the mountain wilds of Montana compose the best musical composition of a decade, so may an ordinary householder produce a motion picture far superior to all others."

See also:
Movie Theater of the Future (1930)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading On Screen (1923)
Robots vs. Musicians (1931)

10,000 Years From Now (1922)

The February 12, 1922 Ogden Standard-Examiner (Ogden, UT) published this page, speculating on the world 10,000 years hence. The piece is a shortened article by Hugo Gernsback with illustrations by Louis Biedermann. Excerpts appear below.

The up-to-date scientist has little difficulty in predicting certain things that will happen in ten or fifty years, but a hundred centuries hence is a larger order, even for the most intrepid imagination. That practically nothing of our present civilization will be left after 10,000 years may be safely predicted. We may also prophesy that human beings, a hundred centuries hence, will live in entirely altered circumstances from those in which we now exist.

Our illustration depicts one of the future cities floating high in the air, several miles above the earth. The question of sustaining such a large body in a rareified atmosphere will prove to be of little difficulty to our future electrical engineers. Just as we construct leviathans of the sea to-day, some of them weighing as much as 50,000 tons we shall construct entire cities weighing billions of tons, which will be held in space not by gas balloons, propellers, or the like antiquated machinery, but by means of gravity-annulling devices. Already experiments have been made whereby it has become possible to reduce the weight of substances by electrical forces.

See also:
Closer Than We Think

Love Will Survive All (1925)

The September 20, 1925 San Antonio Light (San Antonio, TX) speculated about the state of teenage love in 1955. An excerpt appears below.

The adolescents of thirty years hence will probably be in the thick of the argument. And the mothers of these adolescents, if they do their duty will be very much preoccupied with the training calculated both to lesser, the inter-sexual friction and to promote the fighting efficiency of the loving opponents.

Make no mistake, whatever happens, love will endure; it will triumphantly survive the strain, though at moments the strain may be excessive.

See also:
"Just Imagine" Pictures Life and Love 50 Years From Today (1930)
Civilized Adultery (1970)

Whole Meal in Pill (1923)

The August 17, 1923 Rock Valley Bee (Rock Valley, IA) ran a short piece titled, "Whole Meal in Pill Is Scientist's Dream." The entire piece appears below.

A good hearty meal, all in one pill that can be carried in a vest pocket, is the dream of scientists of today, according to Hugh S. Cummings, surgeon general of the public health service.

Some day dish washing and the dinner table will be gone and forgotten. The farthest scientists have progressed, according to Mr. Cummings, is to remove all the water from foods and condense them some 70 per cent.

See also:
Just Imagine (1930)
That Synthetic Food of the Future (Ogden Standard-Examiner, 1926)
Closer Than We Think! Fat Plants and Meat Beets (1958)
Closer Than We Think! Hydrofungal Farming (1962)
Food of the Future (Indiana Progress, 1896)

R.U.R. (1922)

This photograph of the play R.U.R. is courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library of Lincoln Center and appears in the book Radical Robots.

See also:
The Robot is a Terrible Creature (1922)
The Mechanical Man of the Future (1928)

Big Laughs Coming (1922)

The May 31, 1922 Modesto Evening News (Modesto, California) ran an article titled, "Big Laughs Coming," about how future generations may look at the styles, technology and work life of 1922.

The writer of this piece clearly romanticizes the notion of rural life by proclaiming, "We, voluntarily imprisoned in cramped apartments or small house, will seem queer to our descendants. Daily we go to work in our prison cells, to pound typewriter keys, push a pen or perform monotonous operations with machinery - when we might all be free in the outdoors of farmland." The entire article appears below.

In cleaning house this spring, maybe you ran across the old family album. If so, you had a laugh at the peculiar clothing styles and solemn expressions on the faces of former generations.

Did it ever occur to you, that our photographs are also going to get "the merry ha-ha" when future generations discover them in some obscure nook of the airship-houses that will be in use 75 or 100 years from now?

The marvels of today will be laughably old-fashioned later on. It is hard for us to believe this. That has always been the way. Vanity being eternal, each generation - while laughing at the past - is cock-sure that the present is "the real thing."

Have you read Mark Twain's satire, "A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court?" Its film version makes movie audiences roar at the ludicrous effect of a modern American transported back into time 1400 years, unhorsing armored knights with a lasso and knocking them down like nine-pins with a flivver.

The stately dignity of the ancients is farcical, from the 1922 viewpoint.

At lumber mills, teams used to haul boards to boxcars, where they were leisurely transferred by roustabouts.

At a modern mill, the lumber is carried out to the boxcars on a long conveyor belt, a sort of endless moving platform. The lumber comes in a steady stream. An efficiency expert has calculated how fast the loader at the car should work, and the belt is geared accordingly. The loader works at a set speed or gets buried under oncoming boards.

We regard this arrangement solemnly. But, having all the elements of humor, it will make future generations haw-haw.

In the future, automatic machinery and inventions will free men from industrial slavery. Cheap, fast-flying airplanes will enable all to live in the country. Cities, at night, will be deserted groups of factory buildings.

We, voluntarily imprisoned in cramped apartments or small house, will seem queer to our descendants. Daily we go to work in our prison cells, to pound typewriter keys, push a pen or perform monotonous operations with machinery - when we might all be free in the outdoors of farmland.

Will the future consider us laughable, pathetic or crazy?

It's a good thing the average person's sense of humor is not highly developed. Otherwise, we might either revolt against the stupidity of civilization - or laugh ourselves to death at our dignified solemnity.

See also:
Anachronisms of the Future (1911)
The Air Ship: A Musical Farce Comedy (1898)
Sees World Better or Worse (1923)

World of Robots (1929)

The November 10, 1929 Helena Daily Independent (Helena, Montana) ran this short piece about the robots of the future which would enslave humanity by the year 1950.

Birmingham, Eng., Nov. 9. - The world will be a place of mechanical men in 1950, according to the Institute of Industrial Welfare. Skill will have vanished from industry then, it was predicted, and men will be slaves of machines, working ceaselessly in the cause of mass production. The institute is trying to develop "leisure skill" in place of mechanical skill.

See also:
Donald Duck's "Modern Inventions" (1937)
All's Fair at the Fair (1938)
The Mechanical Man of the Future (1928)
The End of Work (1966)
Restaurant Robots (1931)

Sees World Better or Worse (1923)

Of all the contributions to the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram article Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence Educational Director of the Rand School, Algernon Lee makes the most non-commital prediction of them all.

A hundred years hence the world will be either a great deal better than now or a great deal worse.

In the field of individual morality we have made a good deal of progress. On the average, we are less cruel more truthful, more capable of mutual understanding, foresight and self-control than our ancestors were. But this does not enable us to solve the problem which arise out of the increasing complexity of our social system and the enormous growth of our powers of production and destruction.

If the world grows better it will be because mankind gets beyond individual [unreadable] and individual morality and develops a capacity for social self-control commensurate with the growth of our mastery over the forces of nature and with the interdependence of human interests which that involves.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Homework in the Future (1981)
The Answer Machine (1964)
The Road Ahead: Future Classroom (1995)
Closer Than We Think! (1958-1963)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 7, 1993)

Lives of Women to Improve (1923)

Mary Garrett Bay, Chairman (yes, it read "Chairman") of the New York City League of Women Voters wrote a short piece in the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) about the women of 2022.

The life of even the average woman will be broader and better. Woman's drudgery in the household will be eliminated, her car of the family will be lessened as new inventions come in and new methods of work. Women, like men, will do the tasks for which they are best fitted by their permanent gifts and training.

Politically, women will be powerful. They will share with men the real constructive work of government. Many will hold office. If there is not a woman President, the thought of one will shock no one. It will seem natural and proper to elevate women to whatever positions they have the ability to fill. There will be no woman's political party and no man's political party. The two sexes will work together harmoniously.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Longer Honeymoons, Happier Wives (1923)
What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years (Ladies Home Journal, 1900)
Futuristic Air Travel (circa 1900)
In the Twentieth Century (Newark Daily Advocate, 1901)

Longer Honeymoons, Happier Wives (1923)

Margaret Sanger wrote a short piece about the year 2022 for the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut).

Birth control will have become a part of education in health and hygiene. Women especially will be demanding it. They will realize that it is a foundation of freedom and intellectual development for them. Women cannot make real progress today so long as they are haunted by the fear of undesired pregnancy.

The results, in much shorter time than four or five generations, will be happier homes, greater mutual respect between husband and wife, honeymoons lasting two to three years before children arrive, with husband and wife thoroughly [unreadable] to one another, because there has been time for mutual understanding and development before parenthood is entered upon. There will be far more consideration for the mother and more understanding of her needs, with the result of better health and development for the infant as well as greater comfort for the mother. Four or five generations will develop new men and women with finer susceptibilities, nobler sentiments toward each other and a worthier sense of responsibility toward the race.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)

Fruition of Ideals of Democracy (1923)

In a February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) article Cordell Hull, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, bet on the survival of the American two-party system. That wasn't a surprising prediction. What is somewhat surprising is that the assumed alternative was a one-party system.

The principle of democracy being eternal, they will necessarily exist a hundred years from now, and the achievements of government, through the application of those principles to changing conditions, will logically be greater than they have been in the last 100 years.

That there will be two political parties then as now seems almost inevitable, if progress is to continue. It is scarcely conceivable that human nature can change in one century sufficiently for all to think alike. In such an event there would also be danger of inertia - and inertia would mark the beginning of decadence.

Democratic government means a greater diffusion of power, less restriction of the individual and therefore less regulation by laws. With the development of intelligence class differences and distinctions should disappear, therefore the representative legislative bodies of the people, if there are more than one, would be truly representative bodies of all the people.

With a continuation of the discoveries of science, their uses and applications, and a more general acceptance of the fundamental moralities of Christianity I should say that the world, and the United States in particular will be a pretty good place to live in 2022.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Governor Knight and the Videophone (Oakland Tribune, 1955)
Hubert H. Humphrey's Future (1967)
Hubert H. Humphrey's Year 2000 (1967)

Alcohol Unknown in 2022 (1923)

This 1923 prediction in the February 12 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) was written by William H. Anderson, New York Superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League. Mr. Anderson insists that by the year 2022 only the "abnormal, subnormal, vicious and depraved" will drink alcohol.

Drink up you friendly degenerates! We only have a few years left!

By the year 2022 the general public will have learned that the proverb "Wine is a mocker" is scientifically true; will have discovered that beer is "not liquid bread but poisoned water;" and will have accepted the fact that alcohol is "a habit-forming, irritant, narcotic poison." The beverage use of it will be utterly unknown except among the abnormal, subnormal, vicious and depraved, which classes will largely have been bred out of the race in America.

The result will come because the beer and wine campaign will die when the American people comprehends that it seeks to write a lie into the Constitution and in spite of its pretenses would operate to bring back the saloon.

The prohibition Law will speedily be enforced with increasing efficiency due to comprehension that olation of any law brings all laws into contempt and jeopardizes our free institutions.

The millennium will not have arrived because of Prohibition, which will then be world-wide, but the road will have been cleared and made straighter.

See also:
Just Imagine (1930)
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)
Work Days of Two Hours (1923)
United States a British Colony (1923)
Looks for Era of Brotherhood (1923)

Looks for Era of Brotherhood (1923)

Winifred G. Hedenberg laments the brutality of WWI in the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) article "Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence."

The year 2022 will see a world reverted back to barbarism if another war on the scale of the so-called World War takes place within the next fifty years; but it will be a degenerate type of savagery, with man killing his fellows at sight. None of the noble traits of the American Indian will be found in the 2022 type of savage.

On the other hand, if no major conflicts take place between nations I believe 2022 will see an era of universal brotherhood, where poverty, wars, famines, the Republican Party and other like afflictions will be unknown. Prisons as we know them to-day will have vanished. I believe by that time no person will have any reason for theft or the minor crimes responsible for filling our jails to-day.

See also:
Gigantic Robots to Fight Our Battles (Fresno Bee, 1934)
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)
Work Days of Two Hours (1923)
United States a British Colony (1923)

United States a British Colony (1923)

Author and critic Henry L. Mencken makes some pretty bold predictions in the February 12, 1923 article, "Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence," published in the Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut).

A hundred years hence the United States will be a British colony, its chief function will be to supply imbeciles to read the current English novels and docile cannon fodder for the British Army.

I believe that Prohibition will be overthrown and restored several times before 2022. There will be periods of Prohibition and wholesale drunkeness, as now, and periods of license and moderation. Just how the wave will be running in 2022 I hesitate to predict.

The American who will be most agreeably discussed by Anglo-American historians in 2022 will be Woodrow Wilson, the first Premier of the United American Colonies.

The greatest living American author is Dr. Frank Crane. He will be remembered long after Walt Whitman is forgotten.

See also:
Sinclair Lewis Will Be Read Until Year 2000 (1936)
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)
Work Days of Two Hours (1923)

Work Days of Two Hours (1923)

Today's section of the February 12, 1923 article, "Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence," was written by engineer Walter N. Polakov and predicts a future workday of just two hours.

The engineer lives and works for tomorrow; today is but a stepping stone. The dreams of engineers - Frontinus, Da Vinci, Jules Verne, Prof. Bethelot and others - came true; water power is converted in non-substantial form, flying is a reality, submarines and heavier-than-air ships are here, synthetic food and artificial rendering of barren soil into fertile gardens are no longer dreams and ideals. Indeed, the engineers are warranted to dream; nay, more, without the dreams, without ideas beyond immediate reach, the engineers are merely gravediggers.

The problems of 100 years hence will flow from the solutions of problems of today. What are they? There is but one engineering problem today, around which all others hinge: physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual welfare of man. Nothing else matter; everything else in the field of engineering is either contributing or damaging the attainment of this goal of engineering.

Nineteenth century was chained to matter; twentieth century is one of emancipation from matter and of direct control of energy devoid of bulk. This gives us a starting point.

By 2022 we shall be free from pounds of space. Thus, miles, acres, dollars will be terms the meaning of which would be looked up in dictionaries. The units in general use will be second, measures of time, energy and life. Petroleum and coal will nearly be exhausted and means will be [unreadable] to utilize directly the radioactive energy of solar rays. This will not be conducted by cables and wires but secured at the place of its utilization, much as radiograms are received today. Aerial transportation will be revolutionized as air ships need not carry the bulk of power-generating materials and equipment - it will be supplied in transit, and mode of motion will be that of gliding through attraction, with gravitation compensated.

Work will gradually become more and more mental and less physical; hours of work that 100 years ago were sixteen per day and today eight, in 2022 will be not over two hours a day because of the advance in technique. Considerable leisure created by highly specialized experts will call for regenerative recreation and play thus compensating for narrow specialization by broadest development of human personalities in all directions without the tint and sting of mercenarism.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)

Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)

The second part of the February 12, 1923 article, "Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence," focuses on motion pictures.

Written by David Wark Griffith (D.W. Griffith) the piece provides some great insight into the hopes and dreams for this new medium. While he has some spot-on predictions, Griffith couldn't have been more wrong about "instantaneous transmission" (i.e. live television) never taking off.

The great publishing industry will be the publishing of motion pictures instead of print.

Motion picture libraries will be as common as private libraries - more so.

Theatres will have the same relation to these libraries as the spoken theatre today has to the printed copies of dramatic works.

By their very scope and area of appeal the films must vastly outrank the stage in importance. The artistic development should be parallel since one will always draw more or less from the other.

Talking pictures will have been perfected and perhaps have been forgotten again. For the world will have become picture trained so that words are not as important as they are now.

All pictures will be in natural [unreadable]. The theatres will have special audiences; that is, there will be specialty theatres.

I do not see the possibility of instantaneous transmission of living action to the screen within 100 years. There must be a medium upon which the dramatic coherence can be worked out, and the perfected result set firmly before the screen will be permitted to occupy the public's attention. In the instantaneous transmission there would be entirely too much waste of the public's time, and that is the important thing - time.

See also:
Movie Trends of the 21st Century (1982)
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)

Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)

As promised, we have the first in a long list of predictions found in the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut).

Today's excerpt is from architect Thomas Hastings. It's particularly unsettling to read someone from the 1920s writing about the possibility of another World War. I get such a feeling of detachment, as though watching a movie playing out through history.

Architecture expresses the life of each period. Will life a hundred years hence be freer, cleaner, saner? Inevitably the architecture of 2022 will register that. Will civilization relapse perhaps through the medium of another world war, into semi-barbarism? Then barbaric will be the architecture of that time.

There is this much to be said: Steel construction frees architectural design from limitations which masonry necessarily imposed. Thus far the result has been confusion - the one and only real confusion that has ever occurred in a continuous historic succession of architectural developments. But that is because present day architecture steers a wavering course between the Scylla and Charybdis of all modern art; on the one hand, too much archaeology or selection from the past, and on the other hand, too much sterile realism.

Granted a broadened intellectual horizon (and the probability of revolutionizing inventions - even the discovery of forces which we know nothing about now.) the architects of 2022, we can imagine, will be busying themselves with edifices of a statelines and power such as we have only dreamed of hitherto.


See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Prelude to a Great Depression (The Chronicle Telegram, 1929)
Part-Time Robot (1923)

Future Plane Travel (1920)

This 1920 cartoon of future plane travel can be found in the Library of Congress collection.