Miracles You Mostly Didn't See in the Last 50 Years

Man, I love reading stuff like this 1950 article predicting what life would be like in the year 2000 AD. A few of the predictions are at least kinda-sorta right, like weather-predicting computers, an extension of the average lifespan to about 85, and the fact that people would eat a lot of frozen food. Some of them are sadly optimistic, like the prediction of cures for multiple sclerosis and the common cold, or, more amusingly, the assertion that "[w]ith storms diverted where they do no harm, aerial travel is never interrupted." Others fall more than a little short of reality:

Fast jet and rocket-propelled mail planes made it so hard for telegraph companies all over the world to compete with the postal service that dormant facsimile-transmission systems had to be revived. It takes no more than a minute to transmit and receive in facsimile a five-page letter on paper of the usual business size. Cost? Five cents.

Heh. Well, I suppose it would have been far too much for someone in 1950 to have been able to predict e-mail. Then there's the usual off-base 1950's predictions: that the dominant power source would be solar (well, at least they didn't say "atomic"), that families would have their own personal helicopters, that telephones would all have video screens. Oh, and they also predicted factory robots (sort of), but kinda blew it when they got to the part mentioning that "only a few trouble shooters are visible, and these respond to lights that flare up on a board whenever a vacuum tube burns out or there is a short circuit." Oh, yeah, those blown vacuum tubes are a major problem in modern automated factories!

It's easy enough to see where all that stuff comes from, right or wrong, but some of these predictions have a serious WTF? quality to them:

When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything. Why not? Furniture (upholstery included), rugs, draperies, unscratchable floors--all are made of synthetic fabric or waterproof plastic. After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything. A detergent in the water dissolves any resistant dirt. Tablecloths and napkins are made of woven paper yarn so fine that the untutored eye mistakes it for linen. Jane Dobson throws soiled "linen" in the incinerator. Bed sheets are of more substantial stuff, but Jane Dobson has only to hang them up and wash them down with a hose when she puts the bedroom in order.

Mind you, as bizarre as that image is, it's the blithe assumption that of course it's Jane Dobson and not her husband who's going to be doing all the cleaning (and, elsewhere, the cooking and shopping) that strikes the oddest note to my own 21st century mind. Social trends are so much harder to predict than technological ones...

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