

Thomas Edison's 1911 Predictions for 2011 - solipsist
http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-for-the-year-2011-1911.html

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taitems
Ignore the blogspam, original link:
[http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-
prediction...](http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/18/edisons-predictions-
for-the-year-2011-1911.html)

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hugh3
Much better. Let's review the accuracy of his predictions:

1\. _In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at
incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all
the world's machinery), generated by "hydraulic" wheels._

Accuracy: Pretty good (please let's not take this as a cue for another thread
about the lack of a high-speed rail network in country-of-your-choice though).
I'm not sure what "hydraulic wheels" means here.

2\. _He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two
hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to
breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in
Cheapside_

Accuracy: Very good, though too slow by a factor of three (yes yes, airport
security sucks, blah blah blah, I love pre-empting threads).

3\. _The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic
with steel, at a sixth of the present cost -- of steel so light that it will
be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair.
The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradlehis
father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother's
boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by
cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood
her ladyship fancies._

Accuracy: Yes and no. We _could_ have steel furniture, but we generally don't,
because it tends to be ugly. I could build a lightweight sideboard out of
sheet metal if I wanted to, but I'm not sure why I'd bother. In any case,
chipboard turns out to have been the best option for low-cost furniture (hello
Ikea).

4\. _Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so
light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A
book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a
hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all
the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less
than a pound_

I have no idea where this comes from. Maybe we could make a book with ultra-
thin metal pages, but wouldn't they be so insanely delicate that you'd rip the
pages when you tried to turn them? Of course we have better ways to carry
around an encyclopaedia in a tiny volume.

5\. _"Gold," he says, "has even now but a few years to live. The day is near
when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of
steel. We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting
metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in
different proportions."_

This falls into the category "lolwut"? Was this really widely believed in
1911?

6\. _In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners
should not be of solid gold from stem to stern_

Except that gold is really heavy and extremely soft and as a result one of the
worst possible materials for shipbuilding?

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ars
If you replace "steel" with "plastic" it would be pretty accurate.

But I'm really surprised at the suggestion to use gold structurally - even
then he had to have known it's too soft for that. Plus anything common is no
longer luxurious, so if we did have cheap gold no one would want it.

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hugh3
The only real advantage of gold, once it's cheap, is that it doesn't corrode.
In a world before (?) galvanised iron and stainless steel and aluminium and
titanium and even before the sort of high-quality steel paint we have
nowadays, this was a bigger deal.

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atgm
It's interesting to see in the excerpt that he seems to have an "engineer's"
concept of the future with respect to the all steel household. It's an ideal
material from an engineer's perspective as he describes it: light, strong,
long-lasting, rust-proof... the only problem is that it's also uncomfortable
and doesn't any warmth.

Edison was a bit off on the books, but he gets credit for predicting the
direction of the technology -- miniaturization of data. Six inches of DVDs
would more than suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica
and several Libraries of Congress.

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gnok
He was pretty much on the dot about steel houses and electric trains and
flying machines. Fairly accurate about the 'small library in a single volume'
but grossly off the mark with:

'Before long it will be an easy matter to convert a truck load of iron bars
into as many bars of virgin gold'

Apparently, the greatest inventor of all time had a pretty strong belief in
chemical transmutation of metals.

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extension
Eh? Not only are houses and furniture still made of wood, but a large portion
of the wood houses from 1911 are still being lived in.

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gnok
Some furniture and houses are still made of wood. I was referring to massive
skyscrapers made with steel skeletons. In much of the world (where wood is
expensive or hard to find), reinforced concrete (with steel) is a popular
choice instead. Furniture is often steel/iron skeleton with a fabric/wood
layer over it.

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techiferous
The future is rarely the present with the volume cranked up to 11, it's a
shift in focus and direction.

