Imagine a world where strawberries are as big as apples and peas as large as beets. In this imaginary world, mosquitoes, flies and roaches have been exterminated, while horses are nearly extinct. Only a few high breed horses are kept by the rich for racing, hunting and recreation. It is a land where packages are delivered through a network of pneumatic tubes and the letters C, X and Q have been eliminated from the everyday English alphabet in order to simplify it.
These were some of the predictions by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in a Ladies Home Journal article published in the year 1900 entitled, “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years.”
The illustrations in this post are predictions made that same year on souvenir cards produced for the Paris Exposition. They depict what life would be like in the year 2000 (I originally found these on Paleo-Future: A Look into the Future that Never Was. They come from tvhistory.tv).
Most of the predictions were wrong, although a few were correct.
The incorrect ones exemplify why it is so difficult to predict what is going to happen. Our predictions are fuzzy like seeing a giraffe in the distance. We leave out important details and place too much emphasis on the details we imagine. The reason we put so much weight on the accuracy of those imagined details is they are heavily influenced by our present attitudes, feelings and knowledge. We view the future through the lense of the present.
Take Watkin’s prediction that horses would become nearly extinct, for example. It is illustrated below, showing the horse was expected to be so rare it would be put on display as a curiosity.
In the year 1900, automobiles were not widespread, having begun commercial production only ten years earlier. Still, the automobile had sufficient momentum that a forecaster could conceivably project they would replace the horse. What is interesting is how turn of the century attitudes toward thrift and utility influenced that prediction, not to mention the stink a surging horse population was causing for cities.
If the car was expected to replace the horse, then the horse would no longer be needed for farming and transportation. So why continue to raise and feed horses if they have no utility. And if there are no horses, then there is no horse manure and the attendant flies. In 1890, the Times of London estimated by 1950 the city would be buried in 9 feet of horse manure. One estimate is three billion flies hatched per day in U.S. cities in 1900 with horse manure being the preferred fly breeding ground. The stench, the muck and the flies caused by horses was overwhelming. (Here is an interesting article by Eric Morris on the topic).
So the logical forecast for the future based on a late 19th century frame of reference is the horse would become nearly extinct, and it would be a welcome development. What was unseen is the car and other technological breakthroughs would lead to increased efficiencies, greater wealth and more free time, greatly expanding the demand for recreational horse use, not only for the rich, but for farmers, ranchers and many others. The U.S. horse population did drop from an estimated 19 million in 1900 to approximately 9.5 million today. Worldwide horse population today is estimated to be 58 million, far from being extinct.
The turn of the century frame of reference influenced Watkin’s other predictions. Many were agrarian in nature, mirroring the predominant but changing culture back then. Predictions of transportation advances were focused on trains, ships and cars, the modes of transportation experiencing the greatest expansion at the time while the only reference to man flying was air-ships (zeppelins), which were not expected to be competitive with ground transportation for passenger and freight traffic.
What gets left out of all predictions is the unpredictable - the unexpected events, the surprises. It is these surprises that have the greatest impact on the future. They are the game changers that can swamp the incremental improvements and current trends. Since most forecasts are simply extrapolations of current trends, it’s understandable most predictions are wrong because they are torpedoed by disruptive events and surprise technological breakthroughs.
If we can’t escape viewing the future through the lense of the present, are there any circumstances where we can get insight as to what may happen. Yes there are, and I’ll address them in my next post.
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