Sunday, March 2, 2008
Oranges will grow in Philadelphia
I'm a bit of a sucker for historical predictions of the future. This one, from the Ladies' Home Journal, anno 1900, attempts to predict life in the year two thousand. It contains gems such as "Automobiles will be cheaper than horses", and "Wireless telephone circuits will span the world.", but also serves up a few canards; "Storekeepers who expose food to air breathed out by patrons [. . .] will be arrested."
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Interesting read, and for the amusing misses there were quite a few very nice hits.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I _desperately_ want to know why you were browsing back issues of Ladies' Home Journal for what must have been all your lunchbreaks for the past 9 years.
From what I can make up of the upper-right picture there seems to be a spot-on prediction of the sharking phenomenon. Eerie.
ReplyDeleteYeah. I don't get that picture at all. Oddly, the Ladies' Home Journal apparently once published rather inflammatory (for the time) articles by suffragettes and other muckrakers. These days it's more about the hairstyles and diets. I learned this in my obviously meticulous research on the subject.*
ReplyDelete*Meticulous research involved ctrl-c-ctrl-ving a link from reddit. Your definition of "meticulous" may vary.