100 years ago, some prognosticators imagined what it would be like in the year 2025. Some of these are funny/silly, some completely wrong and, some are almost scary because they are pretty accurate! A fun read from the Akron Beacon Journal. Here is a sampling (go to the link for the complete article).

First, the funny/silly:

The future looked ugly to Albert E. Wiggam, an American psychologist. According to his calculations, homely, dull people were having more children than beautiful, intelligent people.

“If we keep progressing in the wrong direction, as we have been doing, American beauty is bound to decline and there won’t be a good-looking girl to be found 100 years from now,” he told an audience in Brooklyn, New York.

The completely wrong (he underestimated the stupidity of mankind):

Sir Ronald Ross, a British doctor who received the 1902 Nobel Prize in medicine for his studies on malaria, told a London audience that life expectancy would continue to increase because of scientific advances.

“That miraculous progress will not stop,” he said. “A great scientist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris has said that in 100 years time, man should live to the age of 150. Why not?

Now, a dose of the weirdly accurate:

English writer H.G. Wells, the author of “The Time Machine,” “The War of the Worlds” and “The Invisible Man,” foretold a new world order for 2025.

Speaking at a dinner gathering at the Hotel Cecil in London, Wells predicted that global power would rest with confederations of people instead of independent countries.

“In a hundred years, there will not be numerous nations, but only three great masses of people — the United States of America, the United States of Europe and China,” he said.

A mix of the silly and the accurate (I suppose he was bound to get something right):

Dr. A.R. Wentz, a professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, anticipated these advances by 2025:

∎ A substitute for sleep would be found. Its chief ingredient would probably be acid sodium phosphate.

∎ Chemistry would be used to produce synthetic foods, making them chiefly out of nitrogen from the atmosphere.

∎ People would use a pocket-sized apparatus for communications to see and hear each other without being in the same room.

∎ There would be world peace, a common world currency and universal free trade.