15 Funniest Historical Predictions About The Year 2020 That Are Dead Wrong
So far, 2020 has not exactly been the best of times (you know what’s the actual reason!). Even six months ago, none of us saw this coming so bad. Though we've seen plenty of impressive technical advances, like AI and Mobile phones that unlock by scanning our faces, it's not quite the world of flying cars and robot butlers people once imagined we'd be living in by now. Want a good laugh? So let’s cut previous generations some slack. They didn’t predict a global pandemic, economic collapse and extended quarantine - but their visions of 2020 look pretty good right now.
Here are 15 hilarious historical predictions on what life would be like in 2020:
1) No one will want to drink tea or coffee anymore
This silly prediction came from one of history’s greatest thinkers, Nikola Tesla, who in 1937 predicted that he was “convinced that within a century, coffee, tea, and tobacco will no longer be in trend. Alcohol, however, will still be used. It is not a stimulant but a veritable elixir of life. The abolition of stimulants will not come about forcibly. It will simply no longer be fashionable to poison the system with harmful ingredients.” He may have been on to something with the tobacco, but coffee and tea? Nice try, Nikola!
2) Humans will become a one-toed species
In a lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1911, a Surgeon by the name of Richard Clement Lucas, clearly didn’t have much respect for all 10 of the toes on our feet. He made a strange prediction: that the "useless outer toes will become used less and less, so that man might become a one-toed race."
3) C, X, and Q will not be part of the alphabet
In 1900, to celebrate the turn of a new century, John Elfreth Watkins Jr., the curator of Mechanical Technology at the Smithsonian, wrote an article for Ladies’ Home Journal about “What May Happen in the Next 100 Years.”
The man of science had no love for what he considered irrelevant letters, and he boldly guessed that by the 2000s, "there will be no C, X, or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because they’re unnecessary." Try telling Xerox that!
4) We’ll live in flying houses
In 1966, noted futurist and 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clarke believed that “Boring houses of 1966 will be able to fly by 2020.”, according to Inverse. Not only that, but if a homeowner decided they wanted to switch up a beach view with some mountain scenery, that would be pretty easy to do, too. “The time may come when whole communities may migrate south in the winter, or move to new lands whenever they feel the need for a change of scenery.”
5) Nobody will work and everybody will be rich
A 1966 article in TIME titled “The Futurists” basically said that because machines would be doing everything for us, no one would really need to work at all. “By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the U.S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy,” the article read. “With government benefits, even non working families will have, by one estimate, an annual income of $30,000 to $40,000”. That's in 1966 dollars, mind you; in 2020, that'd be about $240,000 to $320,000-for doing nothing. We wish!
6) We’ll eat candy made of underwear
One of the oddest, and least appealing, predictions came from The New York Times science editor Waldemar Kaempffert, who wrote an article for Popular Mechanics in which he had some rather strange predictions about our culinary future:
“Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people. A few die-hards still broil a chicken or roast a leg of lamb, but the experts have developed ways of deep-freezing partially baked cuts of meat. Even soup and milk are delivered in the form of frozen bricks.”
But that wasn’t even the grossest part of what Kaempffert saw in our culinary future. He also claimed that research would allow us to supplement our food supply and new and bizarre ways. “Thus sawdust and wood pulp are converted into sugary foods. Discarded paper table ‘linen’ and rayon underwear are bought by chemical factories to be converted into candy.” Any takers?
7) We'll all own personal helicopters
Forget jetpacks and flying cars. This time Popular Mechanics was pretty sure back in 1951 that every family in the 21st century would have at least one helicopter in their garage.
“This simple, practical, foolproof personal helicopter coupe is big enough to carry two people and small enough to land on your lawn,” Thomas E. Stimson Jr. wrote “It has no carburetor to ice up, no ignition system to fall apart or misfire: instead, quiet, efficient ramjets keep the rotors moving, burning any kind of fuel from dime-a-gallon stove oil or kerosene up to aviation gasoline.” Best of all, it was priced around $5,000 - “one-fifth the cost of an ordinary helicopter.” Bargain alert!
8) No one will ever have to clear a dinner table again
9) We'll have ape chauffeurs
In 1967, an article from The Futurist titled “Women and the Year 2000,” suggested that the most highly-trained simians (ape or monkey) could work as chauffeurs, too - and even suggested that having “trained apes as family chauffeurs might decrease the number of automobile accidents.” The Futurist didn’t think much of human drivers.
10) Roadways will be replaced with pneumatic tubes
Speaking of cars: Maybe part of the reason apes would be able to drive us around is because roads would no longer exist. In 1957, Popular Mechanics published a series of predictions about 2020, including one that claimed “roads and streets will be replaced by a network of pneumatic tubes. Family vehicles will need only a small amount of mobile power, since they will only have to get from the owner’s home to a nearby tube. Then they will be pneumatically powered to any desired destination. Pneumatic pockets will completely eliminate the possibility of crashes.”
(Though it’s far from being a reality yet, Tesla and SpaceX’s hyperloop is a pretty close match for this prediction.)
11) We'll wear antenna hats and disposable socks
For a 1939 issue of British Vogue, product designer Gilbert Rohde was asked what he believed people in the 21st century would be wearing - and he had put lots of thoughts. He imagined that, by 2020, we would have banished buttons, pockets, collars, and ties, and that men would revolt against shaving. "His hat will be an antenna, snatching radio out of the ether. His socks—disposable. His suit minus tie, collar, and buttons," Rhode declared.
12) Investing in Apple would be a really dumb financial move
If you had invested $10,000 in Apple back in 1997, which is when Steve Jobs returned as CEO after being expelled from the company - which he co-founded - in 985, that nest egg would be worth about $2.5 million in 2020. But if you had told Dell CEO Michael Dell that at the time, he would have laughed right in your face.
At the time of Jobs’ return, Apple was in dire financial straits and could have very well been headed for bankruptcy. So when Dell was asked what he would do with Apple if he were in Jobs’ position, his response was blunt: “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” (Jobs’ response to that? “F*** Michael Dell.”)
13) There will be "blood banks" for teeth
For a 1947 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine, journalist Lester David promised that in the future, we'd have "tooth banks," too.
"Picture the possibilities," David wrote in the story titled, "How About Tooth Banks?" "Into the junk pile will go all artificial dentures, all bridges, plates, partial plates. All men and women of whatever age will be able to have human teeth embedded inside their gums until the day they die."
14) Vacuums will be nuclear-powered
Alex Lewyt, former president of Lewyt Vacuum Company, obviously wanted the world to be excited about vacuum cleaners. But when he predicted in 1955 that "nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners" would become a reality in the future, he maybe wasn't making the most convincing sales pitch. If the choice were between having dirty floors or plugging in a mini-Chernobyl-waiting-to-happen, we'd probably stick with the crumbs and dust bunnies.
15) There will be no need for futurists to predict the future
Between 1900-2000, many futurists made their predictions as to how 2020 would look. But Dave Evans, the chief futurist for Cisco Visual Networking, actually predicted that he'd be out of a job by this time because, he forecasted, everyone would be able to predict the future themselves.
"By 2020, predicting the future will be commonplace for the average person," he told Mashable in 2012. "We are amassing unprecedented amounts of data… New image and video analysis algorithms and tools will unlock this rich source of data, creating unprecedented insight. Cloud-based tools will allow anyone to mine this data and perform what-if analysis, even using it to predict the future."
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