Stella's Place

Predictions from 100 years ago

What happens if we relook at predictions from 100 years ago?

Futurists usually aren’t judged on the accuracy of their predictions, and people rarely revisit the predictions many years later. Futurists can be wrong and unaccountable; just like meteorologists…

The exception might be Ray Kurzweil who some have claimed to have a stunning 86% accuracy rate. Other disagree with this claim, citing a significantly lower 7% accuracy. In fact, most well-known futurists seem to have less than a 10% accuracy rate.

I don’t think meteorologists would last very long if they only got the weather right once every two weeks.

Archibald Low’s predictions from 100 years ago seem to have done significantly better. Archibald “Archy” Montgomery Low, born in 1888, was an engineer, physicist, inventor, and prolific author. Low is credited with the first unmanned plane (aka drone), the first electrically-steered rocket, and worked on the first televisions.

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Some of the newsworthy men and women who passed away this year – musicians, artists and storytellers who surpassed the ordinary.

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