Almost Right - the Prophecies of John Elfreth Watkins Jr

[Byrd]

Now there's an interesting name, eh?  Not one that you usually see connected with prophecy, yet he made a series of prophecies (in the Ladies Home Journal Magazine, of all places) in 1900 that have in large part come true.

He was an engineer, and the prophecies he made were technology.  And he's better at prophecy than almost all the religious prophets are... and he's a lot more specific.  No more "the metal thingy will collapse and launch mankind to the unknown" vague handwavium.  He got pretty darn specific. (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16444966)

Here's one: "Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. 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 colours."

So... color photography and although he couldn't predict the Internet, Instant Uploaded Cat Pictures are everywhere.

"Americans will be taller by from one to two inches."

Kind of mundane, but really very interesting and indeed true.

"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."

So -- mobile phones.  There was no such thing as wireless telephone and wireless telegraph back then.

Check the (short) article for other prophecies that he got right.

He did get two of them wrong, though:  "There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary."  and " Everybody will walk 10 miles a day"

Yah, that didn't age well.

And one that sadly didn't come true: "Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been exterminated."

But we can hope, eh?

I think that non-religious prophecies do a lot better than the religious ones.

[ArMaP]

As usual in cases like this, they give more importance to the predictions that became true than to those that did not.

1 - Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. 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 colours."

The first colour photo was taken 20 years before he was born, so it was not part of the predictions, it already existed.
The first machine capable of transmitting images like a fax machine is from the 1880s, while radio telegraphy is from the 1890s.

2 - "Americans will be taller by from one to two inches."

Apparently, he got this one right.

3 - "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."

As said above, wireless communications already existed when this was published.

4 - "Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishment similar to our bakeries of today."

Another one he got right.

5 - "There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America [the US]."

This one is wrong.

6 - "Vegetables will be bathed in powerful electric light, serving, like sunlight, to hasten their growth. Electric currents applied to the soil will make valuable plants to grow larger and faster, and will kill troublesome weeds. Rays of coloured light will hasten the growth of many plants. Electricity applied to garden seeds will make them sprout and develop unusually early."

Electric light was already being used in greenhouses in 1900. I don't know if electric currents applied to the soil were ever used.

7 - "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."

This did not existed in 1900 but there were several people working on it, so it was not much of a prediction.

8 - "Huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of today."

Calling today's tanks "huge forts on wheels" is an exaggeration, I don't think he was talking about something like them.

9 - "Strawberries as large as apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren."

Not really.

10 - "Trains will run two miles a minute normally. Express trains one hundred and fifty miles per hour."

True.

I don't have time for the things he got wrong that are no that article and those that aren't. :)

[Tecate]

Awesome OP!
Personally I kinda don’t care what he got wrong, because I see him perhaps more of a forward thinking person.

I’m actually amazed at how he was able to foresee the uses of many things that were in development stages.

Was he getting real glimpses of the future? That is something that more than a few people purport to see. Some fairly accurate, others not so much, but I like to learn about the ones who get things right.

Tecate

[ArMaP]

I’m actually amazed at how he was able to foresee the uses of many things that were in development stages.

He wasn't.

This is what he wrote at the star of the article:

To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been brought in his own filed of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.

Too bad we don't know who made those predictions.

[Tecate]

Good point ArMaP, I agree.

Tecate

[xpert11]

A fascinating topic. I would like to dig more into John Elfreth Watkins Jr's reasoning behind his predictions. However, his logic behind Nicaragua and Mexico becoming U.S. states goes against the Monroe Doctrine.

Another interesting point is his correct predictions survived the last 124 years.

[ArMaP]

A fascinating topic. I would like to dig more into John Elfreth Watkins Jr's reasoning behind his predictions. However, his logic behind Nicaragua and Mexico becoming U.S. states goes against the Monroe Doctrine.

They are not his predictions, the predictions were made by unknown scientists he talked to.

[xpert11]

They are not his predictions, the predictions were made by unknown scientists he talked to.

That makes a lot of sense, and my previous point can be transferred to them.