Sees World Better or Worse (1923)

Of all the contributions to the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram article Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence Educational Director of the Rand School, Algernon Lee makes the most non-commital prediction of them all.

A hundred years hence the world will be either a great deal better than now or a great deal worse.

In the field of individual morality we have made a good deal of progress. On the average, we are less cruel more truthful, more capable of mutual understanding, foresight and self-control than our ancestors were. But this does not enable us to solve the problem which arise out of the increasing complexity of our social system and the enormous growth of our powers of production and destruction.

If the world grows better it will be because mankind gets beyond individual [unreadable] and individual morality and develops a capacity for social self-control commensurate with the growth of our mastery over the forces of nature and with the interdependence of human interests which that involves.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Homework in the Future (1981)
The Answer Machine (1964)
The Road Ahead: Future Classroom (1995)
Closer Than We Think! (1958-1963)
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 7, 1993)

Lives of Women to Improve (1923)

Mary Garrett Bay, Chairman (yes, it read "Chairman") of the New York City League of Women Voters wrote a short piece in the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) about the women of 2022.

The life of even the average woman will be broader and better. Woman's drudgery in the household will be eliminated, her car of the family will be lessened as new inventions come in and new methods of work. Women, like men, will do the tasks for which they are best fitted by their permanent gifts and training.

Politically, women will be powerful. They will share with men the real constructive work of government. Many will hold office. If there is not a woman President, the thought of one will shock no one. It will seem natural and proper to elevate women to whatever positions they have the ability to fill. There will be no woman's political party and no man's political party. The two sexes will work together harmoniously.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Longer Honeymoons, Happier Wives (1923)
What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years (Ladies Home Journal, 1900)
Futuristic Air Travel (circa 1900)
In the Twentieth Century (Newark Daily Advocate, 1901)

Longer Honeymoons, Happier Wives (1923)

Margaret Sanger wrote a short piece about the year 2022 for the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut).

Birth control will have become a part of education in health and hygiene. Women especially will be demanding it. They will realize that it is a foundation of freedom and intellectual development for them. Women cannot make real progress today so long as they are haunted by the fear of undesired pregnancy.

The results, in much shorter time than four or five generations, will be happier homes, greater mutual respect between husband and wife, honeymoons lasting two to three years before children arrive, with husband and wife thoroughly [unreadable] to one another, because there has been time for mutual understanding and development before parenthood is entered upon. There will be far more consideration for the mother and more understanding of her needs, with the result of better health and development for the infant as well as greater comfort for the mother. Four or five generations will develop new men and women with finer susceptibilities, nobler sentiments toward each other and a worthier sense of responsibility toward the race.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)

Alcohol Unknown in 2022 (1923)

This 1923 prediction in the February 12 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) was written by William H. Anderson, New York Superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League. Mr. Anderson insists that by the year 2022 only the "abnormal, subnormal, vicious and depraved" will drink alcohol.

Drink up you friendly degenerates! We only have a few years left!

By the year 2022 the general public will have learned that the proverb "Wine is a mocker" is scientifically true; will have discovered that beer is "not liquid bread but poisoned water;" and will have accepted the fact that alcohol is "a habit-forming, irritant, narcotic poison." The beverage use of it will be utterly unknown except among the abnormal, subnormal, vicious and depraved, which classes will largely have been bred out of the race in America.

The result will come because the beer and wine campaign will die when the American people comprehends that it seeks to write a lie into the Constitution and in spite of its pretenses would operate to bring back the saloon.

The prohibition Law will speedily be enforced with increasing efficiency due to comprehension that olation of any law brings all laws into contempt and jeopardizes our free institutions.

The millennium will not have arrived because of Prohibition, which will then be world-wide, but the road will have been cleared and made straighter.

See also:
Just Imagine (1930)
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)
Work Days of Two Hours (1923)
United States a British Colony (1923)
Looks for Era of Brotherhood (1923)

Looks for Era of Brotherhood (1923)

Winifred G. Hedenberg laments the brutality of WWI in the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) article "Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence."

The year 2022 will see a world reverted back to barbarism if another war on the scale of the so-called World War takes place within the next fifty years; but it will be a degenerate type of savagery, with man killing his fellows at sight. None of the noble traits of the American Indian will be found in the 2022 type of savage.

On the other hand, if no major conflicts take place between nations I believe 2022 will see an era of universal brotherhood, where poverty, wars, famines, the Republican Party and other like afflictions will be unknown. Prisons as we know them to-day will have vanished. I believe by that time no person will have any reason for theft or the minor crimes responsible for filling our jails to-day.

See also:
Gigantic Robots to Fight Our Battles (Fresno Bee, 1934)
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)
Work Days of Two Hours (1923)
United States a British Colony (1923)

United States a British Colony (1923)

Author and critic Henry L. Mencken makes some pretty bold predictions in the February 12, 1923 article, "Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence," published in the Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut).

A hundred years hence the United States will be a British colony, its chief function will be to supply imbeciles to read the current English novels and docile cannon fodder for the British Army.

I believe that Prohibition will be overthrown and restored several times before 2022. There will be periods of Prohibition and wholesale drunkeness, as now, and periods of license and moderation. Just how the wave will be running in 2022 I hesitate to predict.

The American who will be most agreeably discussed by Anglo-American historians in 2022 will be Woodrow Wilson, the first Premier of the United American Colonies.

The greatest living American author is Dr. Frank Crane. He will be remembered long after Walt Whitman is forgotten.

See also:
Sinclair Lewis Will Be Read Until Year 2000 (1936)
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)
Work Days of Two Hours (1923)

Work Days of Two Hours (1923)

Today's section of the February 12, 1923 article, "Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence," was written by engineer Walter N. Polakov and predicts a future workday of just two hours.

The engineer lives and works for tomorrow; today is but a stepping stone. The dreams of engineers - Frontinus, Da Vinci, Jules Verne, Prof. Bethelot and others - came true; water power is converted in non-substantial form, flying is a reality, submarines and heavier-than-air ships are here, synthetic food and artificial rendering of barren soil into fertile gardens are no longer dreams and ideals. Indeed, the engineers are warranted to dream; nay, more, without the dreams, without ideas beyond immediate reach, the engineers are merely gravediggers.

The problems of 100 years hence will flow from the solutions of problems of today. What are they? There is but one engineering problem today, around which all others hinge: physical, intellectual, moral and spiritual welfare of man. Nothing else matter; everything else in the field of engineering is either contributing or damaging the attainment of this goal of engineering.

Nineteenth century was chained to matter; twentieth century is one of emancipation from matter and of direct control of energy devoid of bulk. This gives us a starting point.

By 2022 we shall be free from pounds of space. Thus, miles, acres, dollars will be terms the meaning of which would be looked up in dictionaries. The units in general use will be second, measures of time, energy and life. Petroleum and coal will nearly be exhausted and means will be [unreadable] to utilize directly the radioactive energy of solar rays. This will not be conducted by cables and wires but secured at the place of its utilization, much as radiograms are received today. Aerial transportation will be revolutionized as air ships need not carry the bulk of power-generating materials and equipment - it will be supplied in transit, and mode of motion will be that of gliding through attraction, with gravitation compensated.

Work will gradually become more and more mental and less physical; hours of work that 100 years ago were sixteen per day and today eight, in 2022 will be not over two hours a day because of the advance in technique. Considerable leisure created by highly specialized experts will call for regenerative recreation and play thus compensating for narrow specialization by broadest development of human personalities in all directions without the tint and sting of mercenarism.

See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)
Thinks We'll Do Our Reading on Screen (1923)

Pictures Stately Edifices (1923)

As promised, we have the first in a long list of predictions found in the February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut).

Today's excerpt is from architect Thomas Hastings. It's particularly unsettling to read someone from the 1920s writing about the possibility of another World War. I get such a feeling of detachment, as though watching a movie playing out through history.

Architecture expresses the life of each period. Will life a hundred years hence be freer, cleaner, saner? Inevitably the architecture of 2022 will register that. Will civilization relapse perhaps through the medium of another world war, into semi-barbarism? Then barbaric will be the architecture of that time.

There is this much to be said: Steel construction frees architectural design from limitations which masonry necessarily imposed. Thus far the result has been confusion - the one and only real confusion that has ever occurred in a continuous historic succession of architectural developments. But that is because present day architecture steers a wavering course between the Scylla and Charybdis of all modern art; on the one hand, too much archaeology or selection from the past, and on the other hand, too much sterile realism.

Granted a broadened intellectual horizon (and the probability of revolutionizing inventions - even the discovery of forces which we know nothing about now.) the architects of 2022, we can imagine, will be busying themselves with edifices of a statelines and power such as we have only dreamed of hitherto.


See also:
Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)
Prelude to a Great Depression (The Chronicle Telegram, 1929)
Part-Time Robot (1923)

Thinking Men and Women Predict Problems of World Century Hence (1923)

The February 12, 1923 Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Connecticut) ran an interesting piece looking at the world of 2022.

The article contains contributions from movie producers, architects, teachers, engineers, Margaret Sanger and the head of the NAACP. The introduction is below. Stay tuned as we explore each piece of the article in the coming weeks.

In these piping days of peace, when the face of the world changes as unceasingly as the view from a fast train, to avoid dizziness the eyes must occasionally be directed to that far horizon which moves only slightly - the future. And speculation, now and then, as to what lies beyond that horizon is also helpful in warding off a feeling of bewilderment. Hence this symposium.

"A Hundred Years From Now - What?" was the main question asked by the New York World of the men and women whose contributions appear below: then there were questions dealing with their special work and interests. The result, as these responses show, is a pretty consistently optimistic appraisal of the year 2022 by people who have a wide experience and many points of contact with 1922. There's a good time coming they agree, most of them. The problems that beset us, the strife and jar of normalcy, will all be banished and forgotten, and the world will be a much better place - for our great-great-grandchildren to live in.

Here and there are qualification general the prospect for a century hence seems rosy.

Omissions may be noted. No captain of industry peers ahead through the mist and cries "Land ho!" For the most part, the actual manipulators of affairs, when approached on the subject replied that they were neither prophets nor yet the sons of prophets. It is natural, of course, that a man who is striving with might and main to keep things as they are, or at least to keep them from becoming too different, should find himself staring to see a hundred years ahead. That is how it happens that the majority of contributions are by men and women of a reform, liberal or progressive turn of mind.

See also:
Prelude to a Great Depression (The Chronicle Telegram, 1929)
Part-Time Robot (1923)