View photos The Ladies Home Journal, 1900 More

In 1900 civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins Jr wrote an article for The Ladies Home Journal, called 'What May Happen in the next Hundred Years'; and remarkably, some of his predictions were right on the money.

Watkins, who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, consulted with 'the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning', to come up with the predictions.

He warned the reader that some of the predictions may seem 'strange, almost impossible', but each prediction came from experts in their respective fields.

The experts it seems, were on to something.

Among the 28 predictions made in the article, several came remarkably close to reality 100 years later, while some were way off the mark.

Among them;





Digital colour photography - "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."





Americans will get taller - "Americans will be taller by from one to two inches." In 2001, Americans were 1.76cm taller than their predecessors of 100 years earlier.





Mobile phones – Watkins wrote, "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."





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





Population growth - There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America [the US]." . This prediction was slightly off the mark, but they were on the right track. In 2001, the US population had only hit 280,000,000. The prediction was also not based on general population growth, but on the experts’ belief that both Nicaragua and Mexico would become part of the United States.





Tanks – The experts foresaw wars where "huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of today."

Watkins also appeared to have something of an obsession with fruit. He looked forward to the day when vegetables would be grown under artificial light (true) and fruits such as strawberries and pears would be twice the size they were in 1900. (also true)





Radio & Television - "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."

Watkins also predicted a form of radio. "Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box", he said.





Very fast trains - "Trains will run two miles a minute normally. Express trains one hundred and fifty miles per hour.". While most trains don't quite get up to this speed (especially in Sydney), today's very fast trains are now able to go considerably faster than 150 mp/h. The experts also predicted faster travel by boat and 'airships'.





Air Conditioning – "Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house".

Not everything went quite how Watkins predicted, however.

Among those predictions that didn’t quite come to fruition was the belief that the letters X, C and Q would be eliminated from the alphabet, (unnecessary, Watkins said). Instead, Watkins believed we would all be spelling simply by sound.

Watkins also predicted people would walk '10 miles a day', leaving our major cities virtually free of traffic, which he believed would be "below or above ground when brought within city limits."

The article also predicted big changes for the animal kingdom. He claimed the only animals we would see were the ones kept in zoos, while rats, mice, cockroaches and mosquitoes would be extinct.

This prediction, we kind of wish would come true.