Wattpad brings you a guest post from Mark Jeffrey, author of Age of Aether, our latest featured story:
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When I was doing research for my steampunk novel, Age of Aether, I wanted to understand what the Victorian world would have felt like emotionally: how did the inhabitants view their present — as well as speculate on the future and technology? To my delight, I quickly found my way to several treasure troves of information from the year 1900, wherein both brilliant minds and ordinary people attempted to predict what the year 2000 would look like.
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The Ladie’s Home Journal in December, 1900 hired John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. to research and the write an article entitled: “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”. Mr. Watkins describes his experience with this article thus: “These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible. Yet, they have come from the most learned and conservative minds in America. To the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning I have gone, asking each in his turn to forecast for me what, in his opinion, will have been wrought in his own field of investigation before the dawn of 2001 - a century from now. These opinions I have carefully transcribed.”
Now. Let’s see how the twirly-moustachio’d ironic monocles of old did, shall way?
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“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. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors … 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. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.”
The Verdict: Hit! Spot on, in fact — even conservative. iPhones uploading to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube capture this perfectly. The only thing they got wrong? We view on our handheld ‘apparatus’ rather than via a theater.
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“Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.”
The Verdict: Wildly, wildly wrong. Obesity was only 3% when this was written; now it is nearing 50%. And walking 10 miles? Most Americans couldn’t hack that today. And those Segue’s don’t help a bit.
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“The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs.”
The Verdict: Mixed. We are taller, and we live until our seventies on average. This was an eye-opener for me: I didn’t realize thirty-five was the average life expectancy when I began my novel!
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“There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other.”
The Verdict: Ummmm no. Though, we do have ‘condensed’ English like LOL and OMG, Twitter hashtags, etc. brought on by our use of computers. We are nearing an abbreviated language for certain.
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“Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles.”
The Verdict: Correct! It’s called Amazon.com! Well, no pneumatics … but everything else was right!
“There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of today. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.”
The Verdict: Sort of a yes and no. It eerily predicts the rise of factory farms when animals are cruelly penned in small spaces. But we do have wild animals still — including rats and mice.
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“There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.”
The Verdict: The population prediction is spot on: we’re at 400,000,000 right now. And NAFTA is the first step towards attempted integration of several countries — whether national sovereignty will trump integration remains to be seen.
There were a lot of concerns about changes in animals and plants, and of course a lot of flying machines — flying machines everywhere! I used much of what I found and extrapolated the rest (for example: ladies of leisure in my world are frequently seen with miniature horses instead of poodles). But it did make me wonder: how accurately could we predict the future one hundred years hence? Could we do nearly as well as these folks? Or has the rate of technological change increased so dramatically that we cannot expect to reasonably be able to see around the next corner any more? Let me know what you think in the comments!
Pictures in this article: ”France in the Year 2000 (XXI century)” – a series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the year 2000. There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists, the first series being produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. (All images via Wikimedia Commons).
Read Age of Aether on Wattpad!
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Age of Aether — A Steampunk Adventure-Romance Novella.
When Capt. Ben Bantam is tapped to go back in time in order to retrieve a cure for the vicious Shadow plague, he is shocked to arrive in an alternate 1944 where electricity doesn’t exist. Instead, a parallel past has mysteriously arisen — complete with parasols, stunningly luxurious Aerotels, hydrologic computing, Helux-powered ‘cloud growlers’ and a space elevator-based moon race with Germany. And of course, there is the lovely Dr. Rachelle Archenstone …
But when Hitler is made Chancellor in this world and the American space program sabotaged, Bantam is the only one who realizes the true depth of the danger posed by the newly formed Nazi party. Together with Rachelle, he races to save this America while seeking an explanation to the mystery of this alternate past — and with it, a way to return to his own world with the Shadow’s cure. But when it comes down to a choice between his lovely Rachelle and a thousand years of Nazi rule, what will he do?
Thrill to a tale of a Yesterday that never was … And yet was!
Mark Jeffrey (@markjeffrey on Twitter) is also the author of the best-selling young adult novel MAX QUICK: THE POCKET AND THE PENDANT (HarperCollins, 2011) which received over 2.6 million downloads as a podcast audiobook.