What awaits us in our Future? 100 years from now?
“Anything, everything is possible.” Thomas Edison, 1908
A year ago I subscribed to the Smithsonian Magazine. I was tired of subscribing to a bunch of magazines that would only hold a few articles of which I was truly interested in reading, or that talked about things I enjoy learning and reading about. I’m one of those people that need to constantly stimulate my brain, or I will go crazy. Which is when I decided to subscribe to the Smithsonian.
I’ve been much to busy to read the magazines up until recently. So I only just started reading my January 2008 Volume 32 #10 edition. Page 42 starts a very intriguing article by Jim Rasenberger titled, 1908*.
In that article, Jim discusses the things that have happened in 1908, as well as very accurate predictions that the people of that time had made. I will include parts of the article in this write, as I go along, word for word of course (all credit for the parts I include go to Jim Rasenberger for writing it), so that if you haven’t read that magazine article, you can get an accurate picture of what spurred my interest in this. As well as parts that I find interesting, and that maybe will teach someone else, something new as well.
“The year 1908 began at Midnight when a 700-lb “electric ball” fell from the flagpole atop the New York Times building – the first-ever ball-drop in Times Square. It ended 366 days later (1908 was a leap year) with a nearly two-and-a-half-hour flight by Wilbur Wright, the longest ever made in an air plane. In the days between, the U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet sailed around the world, Adm. Robert Peary began his conquest of the North Pole, Dr. Frederick Cook reached the North Pole (or claimed to), six automobiles set out on a 20,000-mile race from New York to Paris, and the Model T went into production at Henry Ford’s plant in Detroit, Michigan.”
Needless to say, as you can see above, a lot of things happened during 1908. I learned a lot just reading that first paragraph. Things I hadn’t known before, but now I will definitely remember. They say that the 20,000-mile trip from New York to Paris took approximately 5 months to do. It started Feb. 12th and ended July 30th. They had to take many different routes to achieve it, and if you think about it, that must’ve been quite hard on the drivers since they didn’t have all the modern conveniences in their vehicles as we have in ours today.
“Like George Walker Bush, Theodore Roosevelt had entered the White House without winning the popular vote (an assassination put TR into office), then conducted himself with unapologetic force. And it was clear then, as it is now, that the country was heading into a new world defined by as yet unwritten rules, and that the man about to exit office bore not a little responsibility for this.”
As you can see from the above, they were faced with a lot of the similar issues we face today. Not my comparison, but only referring to Jim’s comparisons above, in regards to the comparisons of the people’s opinions back then, in the same aspects of a lot of the people of today. How much did we really change in 100 years then I’d have to wonder?
“U.S. citizens enjoyed the highest per capita income in the world and were blessed with railroads and automobiles, telegraph and telephone, electricity and gas. Men shaved their whiskers with disposable razor blades and women tidied their homes with remarkable new devices called vacuum cleaners.”
I just enjoyed this part because of the fact that I would like to go back and give a nice big thank you to the people for inventing these items back then. How about you? :)
Which of course brings me to another fun little part of the 8-page story about 1908 and the inventions and predictions.
“In October, during the climax of one of the most thrilling seasons in baseball history (the Chicago Cubs would snatch the National League pennant from the New York Giants, then defeat the Detroit Tigers in the World Series – which they haven’t won since.), Henry Ford introduced his oddly shaped new automobile, the Model T… When first introduced the Model T was boxy and top-heavy. The automobile writer Floyd Clymer would later call it “unquestionably ugly, funereally drab.””
Because of the high price sticker – for the time – not too many people could actually afford to have the few vehicles that were produced back then. A “horseless-carriage” could only be afforded by the rich, and/or socialite types. Which of course, didn’t really go over so well with everyone else. I ask, has that really changed? The way that people that cannot afford such luxuries look upon the people that can? What has 100 years changed in that aspect?
Later though, I am to understand that one of the reasons why Ford actually changed the way we use the steering wheel by moving it to the left side of the vehicle was to “improve the driver’s perspective of approaching vehicles.”
“Ford Motor Company launched a national advertising campaign, with ads appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Weekly and other magazines. For an “unheard of” price of $850, the ads promised “a 4-cylinder, 20 h.p., five passenger family car – powerful, speedy and enduring.” An extra $100 would buy such amenities as a windshield, speedometer and headlights … By 1916, the price would lower the price to $360.”
Now such amenities for our vehicles are to have A/C, CD players, DVD players, etc., what honestly would those same people think about all the ‘extras’ we get now I wonder? Especially since IF they could actually afford a car, would they be able to afford that little extra to actually be able to drive in the dark? By acquiring those headlights? Headlights and windshields were considered the “amenities.” Makes you think.
Some ads for the Model T - http://oldcarandtruckads.com/Ford/1908_Ford01_Ad.jpg
This is what really got my brain thinking about writing this whole thing and started producing all these thoughts in my head …
“”What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?” The U.S. population of 2008, the newspaper predicted, would be 472 million (it’s 300 million). “We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves. We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need. Who can say?””
Jim goes on about the other predictions …
“Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute declared in a medical report that human organ transplants would soon be common… “When the expectations of wireless experts are realized everyone will have his own pocket telephone and may be called wherever he happens to be,” Hampton’s Magazine daringly predicted in 1908. “The citizen of the wireless age will walk abroad with a receiving apparatus compactly arranged in his hat and tuned to that one of myriad vibrations by which he has chosen to be called. . . . When that invention is perfected, we shall have a new series of daily miracles.””
I’m not quite sure that I have something in my hat tuned to one of a “myriad” of vibrations, but the last time I checked I DO have a “pocket telephone” and a headset for it. Don’t you? Obviously the people of 1908 were, in fact, quite accurate in their predictions. They accurately predicted that we would have some kind of cell phone which nearly everyone has today. How many other accurate predictions of the past will we not know of? That will have been accurately predicted by our grandfather’s or great-grandfathers – depending on your age of course? Our grandparents were hard workers. They spent their time living their life and truly remembering everything that counted. If they could predict that we would have cell phones, what else came from them to us, that we haven’t learned from this article? They obviously knew a lot more about the future, and what it would hold, then most people think about today.
“It’s striking, in fact, how much more hopeful Americans were then than we are today. We live in a nation that is safer, healthier, richer, easier, and more egalitarian than it was in 1908, but a recent Pew Research Center poll found that barely one-third of us feel optimistic about the future.”
Is that true? That so many of us are faced with less hope now than back then? How have we become a nation that thinks our future so bleak? Compared with everything that we had to suffer back then, our lives have become a lot easier, but of course, not simpler. In one way it has, but in others I can understand that it hasn’t. But how so can we evolve over 100 years worth of time, I wonder, and not feel more hopeful for our future then the people of 1908?
Jim finishes his article with this paragraph …
“We are left with the disquieting thought that the next 100 years may bear a price for the conveniences and conquests of the last 100.”
So that is what this blog has inspired. Apparently, I am not the only one curious about what 2108 holds for us since I found a lot of interesting articles about this same information. *Jim published a book entitled America 1908. In that book, he tells more about all of which he wrote for the Smithsonian. There is even a contest** for people to predict what they think will come of 2108. But, I would like to know what YOU think.
I found another site*** that holds Jim’s article and asks for predictions as well. I quite enjoyed what 7th Grader (probably 12 years old) Kate Kaplan had to say about the future on page 2,
Central Park will be preserved in a bubble to protect it from the adverse effects of global warming. Everything will be shiny and nice and big. The subway cars and stations will have TVs in them. The Empire State Building will no longer be New York’s largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks. Madame Tussaud’s wax figures will have robotic capabilities.
Finally, instead of antidepressants, doctors will make people happy by implanting chips in their heads with comedy routines and programs, like my favorite, “The Colbert Report.” ”
What do you think we have to look forward to in the next 100 years?
What accomplishments do you think we will achieve?
What inventions will we have?
What does OUR future have in store for us?
Give me your predictions. Give me your thoughts on all this.
Do you have hope for the next 100 years for us as a nation?
If you’re reading, you’re leaving a comment :)
*Found out from searching online for more predictions that Jim Rasenberger has written this clips for the Smithsonian Magazine from his book, simply titled America 1908. Find it at your local bookstore. For more info on the book and timeline, or anything else related, go here - http://www.america1908.com/america_1908_book.html
More links :
** http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/2008-2108-prediction-contest/
***http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/nyregion/thecity/30year.html?_r=1&em&ex=1199250000&en=b62f186d22d44f5c&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin
“Anything, everything is possible.” Thomas Edison, 1908
A year ago I subscribed to the Smithsonian Magazine. I was tired of subscribing to a bunch of magazines that would only hold a few articles of which I was truly interested in reading, or that talked about things I enjoy learning and reading about. I’m one of those people that need to constantly stimulate my brain, or I will go crazy. Which is when I decided to subscribe to the Smithsonian.
I’ve been much to busy to read the magazines up until recently. So I only just started reading my January 2008 Volume 32 #10 edition. Page 42 starts a very intriguing article by Jim Rasenberger titled, 1908*.
In that article, Jim discusses the things that have happened in 1908, as well as very accurate predictions that the people of that time had made. I will include parts of the article in this write, as I go along, word for word of course (all credit for the parts I include go to Jim Rasenberger for writing it), so that if you haven’t read that magazine article, you can get an accurate picture of what spurred my interest in this. As well as parts that I find interesting, and that maybe will teach someone else, something new as well.
“The year 1908 began at Midnight when a 700-lb “electric ball” fell from the flagpole atop the New York Times building – the first-ever ball-drop in Times Square. It ended 366 days later (1908 was a leap year) with a nearly two-and-a-half-hour flight by Wilbur Wright, the longest ever made in an air plane. In the days between, the U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet sailed around the world, Adm. Robert Peary began his conquest of the North Pole, Dr. Frederick Cook reached the North Pole (or claimed to), six automobiles set out on a 20,000-mile race from New York to Paris, and the Model T went into production at Henry Ford’s plant in Detroit, Michigan.”
Needless to say, as you can see above, a lot of things happened during 1908. I learned a lot just reading that first paragraph. Things I hadn’t known before, but now I will definitely remember. They say that the 20,000-mile trip from New York to Paris took approximately 5 months to do. It started Feb. 12th and ended July 30th. They had to take many different routes to achieve it, and if you think about it, that must’ve been quite hard on the drivers since they didn’t have all the modern conveniences in their vehicles as we have in ours today.
“Like George Walker Bush, Theodore Roosevelt had entered the White House without winning the popular vote (an assassination put TR into office), then conducted himself with unapologetic force. And it was clear then, as it is now, that the country was heading into a new world defined by as yet unwritten rules, and that the man about to exit office bore not a little responsibility for this.”
As you can see from the above, they were faced with a lot of the similar issues we face today. Not my comparison, but only referring to Jim’s comparisons above, in regards to the comparisons of the people’s opinions back then, in the same aspects of a lot of the people of today. How much did we really change in 100 years then I’d have to wonder?
“U.S. citizens enjoyed the highest per capita income in the world and were blessed with railroads and automobiles, telegraph and telephone, electricity and gas. Men shaved their whiskers with disposable razor blades and women tidied their homes with remarkable new devices called vacuum cleaners.”
I just enjoyed this part because of the fact that I would like to go back and give a nice big thank you to the people for inventing these items back then. How about you? :)
Which of course brings me to another fun little part of the 8-page story about 1908 and the inventions and predictions.
“In October, during the climax of one of the most thrilling seasons in baseball history (the Chicago Cubs would snatch the National League pennant from the New York Giants, then defeat the Detroit Tigers in the World Series – which they haven’t won since.), Henry Ford introduced his oddly shaped new automobile, the Model T… When first introduced the Model T was boxy and top-heavy. The automobile writer Floyd Clymer would later call it “unquestionably ugly, funereally drab.””
Because of the high price sticker – for the time – not too many people could actually afford to have the few vehicles that were produced back then. A “horseless-carriage” could only be afforded by the rich, and/or socialite types. Which of course, didn’t really go over so well with everyone else. I ask, has that really changed? The way that people that cannot afford such luxuries look upon the people that can? What has 100 years changed in that aspect?
Later though, I am to understand that one of the reasons why Ford actually changed the way we use the steering wheel by moving it to the left side of the vehicle was to “improve the driver’s perspective of approaching vehicles.”
“Ford Motor Company launched a national advertising campaign, with ads appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Weekly and other magazines. For an “unheard of” price of $850, the ads promised “a 4-cylinder, 20 h.p., five passenger family car – powerful, speedy and enduring.” An extra $100 would buy such amenities as a windshield, speedometer and headlights … By 1916, the price would lower the price to $360.”
Now such amenities for our vehicles are to have A/C, CD players, DVD players, etc., what honestly would those same people think about all the ‘extras’ we get now I wonder? Especially since IF they could actually afford a car, would they be able to afford that little extra to actually be able to drive in the dark? By acquiring those headlights? Headlights and windshields were considered the “amenities.” Makes you think.
Some ads for the Model T - http://oldcarandtruckads.com/Ford/1908_Ford01_Ad.jpg
This is what really got my brain thinking about writing this whole thing and started producing all these thoughts in my head …
“”What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?” The U.S. population of 2008, the newspaper predicted, would be 472 million (it’s 300 million). “We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves. We may have aeroplanes winging the once inconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need. Who can say?””
Jim goes on about the other predictions …
“Dr. Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute declared in a medical report that human organ transplants would soon be common… “When the expectations of wireless experts are realized everyone will have his own pocket telephone and may be called wherever he happens to be,” Hampton’s Magazine daringly predicted in 1908. “The citizen of the wireless age will walk abroad with a receiving apparatus compactly arranged in his hat and tuned to that one of myriad vibrations by which he has chosen to be called. . . . When that invention is perfected, we shall have a new series of daily miracles.””
I’m not quite sure that I have something in my hat tuned to one of a “myriad” of vibrations, but the last time I checked I DO have a “pocket telephone” and a headset for it. Don’t you? Obviously the people of 1908 were, in fact, quite accurate in their predictions. They accurately predicted that we would have some kind of cell phone which nearly everyone has today. How many other accurate predictions of the past will we not know of? That will have been accurately predicted by our grandfather’s or great-grandfathers – depending on your age of course? Our grandparents were hard workers. They spent their time living their life and truly remembering everything that counted. If they could predict that we would have cell phones, what else came from them to us, that we haven’t learned from this article? They obviously knew a lot more about the future, and what it would hold, then most people think about today.
“It’s striking, in fact, how much more hopeful Americans were then than we are today. We live in a nation that is safer, healthier, richer, easier, and more egalitarian than it was in 1908, but a recent Pew Research Center poll found that barely one-third of us feel optimistic about the future.”
Is that true? That so many of us are faced with less hope now than back then? How have we become a nation that thinks our future so bleak? Compared with everything that we had to suffer back then, our lives have become a lot easier, but of course, not simpler. In one way it has, but in others I can understand that it hasn’t. But how so can we evolve over 100 years worth of time, I wonder, and not feel more hopeful for our future then the people of 1908?
Jim finishes his article with this paragraph …
“We are left with the disquieting thought that the next 100 years may bear a price for the conveniences and conquests of the last 100.”
So that is what this blog has inspired. Apparently, I am not the only one curious about what 2108 holds for us since I found a lot of interesting articles about this same information. *Jim published a book entitled America 1908. In that book, he tells more about all of which he wrote for the Smithsonian. There is even a contest** for people to predict what they think will come of 2108. But, I would like to know what YOU think.
I found another site*** that holds Jim’s article and asks for predictions as well. I quite enjoyed what 7th Grader (probably 12 years old) Kate Kaplan had to say about the future on page 2,
“The city will be all skyscrapers, no more town houses and brownstones. Buildings will connect to each other through an aboveground tunnel system. You’ll no longer have to worry about finding a bathroom; you’ll just carry a small chip with you that can expand into a private portable toilet.
Central Park will be preserved in a bubble to protect it from the adverse effects of global warming. Everything will be shiny and nice and big. The subway cars and stations will have TVs in them. The Empire State Building will no longer be New York’s largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks. Madame Tussaud’s wax figures will have robotic capabilities.
Finally, instead of antidepressants, doctors will make people happy by implanting chips in their heads with comedy routines and programs, like my favorite, “The Colbert Report.” ”
What do you think we have to look forward to in the next 100 years?
What accomplishments do you think we will achieve?
What inventions will we have?
What does OUR future have in store for us?
Give me your predictions. Give me your thoughts on all this.
Do you have hope for the next 100 years for us as a nation?
If you’re reading, you’re leaving a comment :)
*Found out from searching online for more predictions that Jim Rasenberger has written this clips for the Smithsonian Magazine from his book, simply titled America 1908. Find it at your local bookstore. For more info on the book and timeline, or anything else related, go here - http://www.america1908.com/america_1908_book.html
More links :
** http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/2008-2108-prediction-contest/
***http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/nyregion/thecity/30year.html?_r=1&em&ex=1199250000&en=b62f186d22d44f5c&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin
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