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Scientist’s ‘Ruthlessly Imaginative’ 1925 Predictions For the Future (theguardian.com)44

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @10:30PM from the predicting-the-future dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian:When the scientist and inventor Prof Archibald Montgomery Low predicted “a day in the life of a man of the future” one century ago, his prophecies were sometimes dismissed as “ruthlessly imaginative.” They included, reported the London Daily News in 1925, “such horrors” as being woken by radio alarm clock; communications “by personal radio set”; breakfasting “with loudspeaker news and television glimpses of events”; shopping by moving stairways and moving pavements. One hundred years after Low’s publication of his book The Future some of his forecasts were spot on. Others, including his prophecy that everyone would be wearing synthetic felt one-piece suits and hats, less so.

Researchers from the online genealogy service Findmypast, have excavated accounts of Low’s predictions from its extensive digital archive of historical newspapers available to the public and included them in a collection on its website of forecasts made for 2025 by people a century ago. Low, born in 1888, was an engineer, research physicist, inventor and author. A pioneer in many fields, he invented the first powered drone, worked on the development of television, was known as the “father of radio guidance systems” for his work on planes, torpedo boats and guided rockets and reportedly attracted at least two unsuccessful assassination attempts by the Germans.“It’s amazing that a century ago, one visionary scientist could predict how emerging technology — in its infancy at the time — could have changed the world by 2025,” said Jen Baldwin, a research specialist at Findmypast. “It makes you stop to wonder how the advancements we see around us today will be experienced by our own descendants.”

/Sea

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›Not a “futurist”? (Score:4, Funny)by Mean Variance( 913229 ) <mean.variance@gmail.com> on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @10:45PM (#65054387)was an engineer, research physicist, inventor and author.At least he wasn’t called a futurist though it could be valid. I have been to conferences where authors carry that stupid term.Too bad the felt suit didn’t catch on. Nice and soft.Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate
- Re: Not a “futurist”?I have a cotton/poly or all-synthetic one-piece pajama suit. It *is* cozy. But it’s not my first choice for any activity other than sleep or vegging out in front of the tv.
- Re:This guy was an actual engineer and a good one it seems. “Futurists” generally do not reach that skill-level.
  - Re:where I work, that is not correct, you have to have been a successful scientist or engineer, held patents and worked toward forecasts for the future that were actually correct before you can then earn the title of futurist… of course, the people I SEE calling themselves futurists, not the people who are CALLED futurists, seem to fit your description.
    - Re:That nicely sums up the problem. Publicly visible “Futurists” are basically universally self-styled.
- Re: Not a “futurist”?Bamboo [littlesleepies.com]. I wfh and wear this almost exclusively. Do the same and your life will improve.
Easy job (Score:2)Either say “we’ve invented everything, nothing will change” and you’ll be forgotten if incorrect… Or predict a bunch of the most likely stuff and people will only pay attention to the stuff that seems correct.I predict robots become the new poor, and the poor become completely disposable rabble kept away from the rich by their robots.
- Re: Easy jobWith blackjack. And hookers.Also, the robots have some sort of cargo cult religion.
- Re: Easy jobThe BBC talked about him predicting the escalator. A device that already existed for quite some time at that point. Sheesh
Sounds like sci-fi writers (Score:3)by quonset( 4839537 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @11:01PM (#65054403)”It is the distant year 2015. Mankind has reached all corners of the galaxy and sets its sights on the universe.”Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate
“prophecies” (Score:3)by illaqueate( 416118 ) on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @11:05PM (#65054413)It’s cool that he was imaginative but some of those examples aren’t impressive if you go and look at the history of those technologies? The first escalator patent was in 1859. Radio was a mass medium in the 1920s and alarm clocks were invented 50 years earlier. It seems obvious from there to invent a clock radio… Usually when you look it’s not the concept of a thing that is the barrier it’s the underlying technology i.e. the details. It’s just mildly interesting because 2025 was mentioned.Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate
- Re:A scientist making prophecies? Maybe the author meant predictions?
- Re:I think his idea of a clock radio was the clock would pick up a universal time signal (what we call the WWVB today) and set off an alarm at a predetermined time. I don’t see how that is any more advantageous than using a mechanical analog clock with wind up bell though.
  - Re:There’s a fair number of advantages I can see over a mechanical wind up clock:
    1. More accurate – I used to use a mechanical clock. Unless the manufacturer was really spot on, which is expensive, it could lose or gain several minutes a day.
    2. Less labor – you need to keep winding the clock up, or you can just plug in or use batteries with a clock-radio
    3. Gentler – My radio alarm clock can be set to increase the volume gradually.
    4. More informative – it triggers to the radio. Which means that I can be g
  - Re:What most people use now is a cellphone and it most certainly does have a clock set by a universal radio signal, which is GPS. Although, the wall clocks in my home are WWVB.
- Re:It’s also a great example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, we’re mapping current interpretations of tech onto his vague predictions and declaring them “spot on”. I doubt anything more than a miniscule fraction of the population gets woken by a wireless set with a clock, no-one communicates via personal wireless sets (so a valve/tube radio with a microphone), apart from airports no-one has “moving pavements”, etc. Sure, you can map any current tech onto what he said in the same way you can map any curren
  - Re:Your phone is a wireless set. Just saying.
    - Re:Your phone is a wireless set. Just saying. I honestly would bet that the majority of the population doesn’t know a cellphone is a handheld radio, like a walkie-talkie. (Not on /., but the general population).
      - 1 hidden comment
      - Re:Tangentially related, in Australian elections it’s an offence to “operate a radio transmitter” at a polling place. But they never do anything about people talking on mobile phones while waiting in line to get their ballot paper. If they wanted to be dicks about it, they could probably fine a lot of people.
HD tv (Score:1)One of the inventors of the television, Farnsworth predicted HD tv in the 50’s. There is a clip on youtube somewhere when he is on a game show.
In the year 2125… (Score:2, Funny)Joe Biden’s head in a jar is inaugurated for a second term. His vice president is an AI clone of Corn Pop extrapolated entirely from one YouTube video of Biden dedicating a new swimming pool in Wilmington.
- Re:I think it’ll be more like Idiocracy than Futurama. I’m going to start the new year with an adult latte from Starbucks.
  - Re:Hey! Right now I’m in my favorite Starbucks in Al Barsha 1, Dubai, UAE, at 9:12 AM UTC+4 GST on 2025-01-01 !!
    - 1 hidden comment
  - Re: In the year 2125…I shudder at the thought of the possibilities of what could make a latte an adult latte.I’m hoping it’s just a little alcohol added.We know the difference between a kid movie and an adult movie.
- Re:LOL “terms” in 2125. Your side plans to eliminate them in 2025.And I’d take a head in a jar over the diaper-wearing garbage bag of fecal matter we’re about to get.
This sucks (Score:2)I just picked up my first synthetic felt onesie.
Not much has changed (Score:2)100 years later, we still imagine the future to be space travel, robots, and flying cars.Back then they had already invented modern physics, cars, planes, bicycles, rockets, radio, TV, refrigeration, electric lights, …
Since then, highlights include containerized shipping, aerosol cans, nuclear weapons, pop tarts and social media.
- 1 hidden comment
- Re:ChatGPT would absolutely blow their minds and they would have no intuition of how it works.
  - Re:So just like us then? We can go on about linear algebra, calculus, the transformer model, but still no more know “how it works” than an organic chemist knows how the human brains works.
    - Re: Not much has changedI dunno dude. They had computing machinery in 1925, and some of the theory, but it’s still a vastly different world when it’s the size of a building versus cheap enough for everyone to have one or two in their pockets at any given moment.
      - Re:Of course. I was just responding to “no intuition of how it works”. We know how to build and train AI, but not really how it works.If you showed ChatGPT to someone in the 1960s, and asked them to guess what year it was made, what would they say? 1995?
        
        Re:the 1960’s was a period with breakneck speed of development, they would likely presume that that speed would continue, so just as moonbases were forecast to be in place around 1980, they would have felt lots of other things were coming that then actually took decades to come, or never came.
- Re:are you actually familiar with what passed for ‘rockets’ in 1925? TV? you’ve forgotten about transistors ( invented after 1925) LED’s and LASER, All the breakthroughs in Physics since then…
Not a miss (Score:5, Funny)by Black Parrot( 19622 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2025 @01:47AM (#65054561)everyone would be wearing synthetic felt one-piece suits and hatsHe foresaw furries!Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate
Past, Not Future (Score:2)Escalators and moving walkways were several decades old by time he wrote that. They had already been installed in a few department stores. That’s not really a prediction.
- Re:Past, Not Future (Score:4, Interesting)by Firethorn( 177587 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2025 @04:01AM (#65054627) Homepage JournalHe probably predicted that moving walkways would be as common as elevators are today, and not mostly restricted to airports.Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate
I want a synthetic one piece felt suit. (Score:2)Synthetic one piece felt suit? Onesies come close…
“In the year 2000” (Score:2)See also “France in the year 2000” postcard series from 1899 highlighted today at “Flying Firemen and Underwater Croquet” Jan 2025 https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/arti… [cdc.gov] and nearly completely pictured at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/… [wikimedia.org]
Topics addressed:
* transportation: individual flying, inter-cities air transport, air races, air taxis, air cargo transport, air rescue, air delivery; bullet train;
* automation: a robot “vacuum” cleaner (no vacuum but idea of self movement), remote operated mechanical farming;
*
- Re:These are great! Thanks for sharing.
In the year 2525 (Score:2)IF man is still alive, they may find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?… [youtube.com]

56thst.com

Articles, books and commentary by Joel Snell

1925 100 YEARS INTO FUTURE

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Scientist’s ‘Ruthlessly Imaginative’ 1925 Predictions For the Future (theguardian.com)44

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