01-31-2024, 02:55 AM
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.
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.
