From immortality to ugly people: 100-year-old predictions about 2025
Look around you. The future has arrived.
Nearly 100 years ago, a group of deep thinkers dared to imagine what life would be like in 2025. Some of their prophecies were completely off target, while others proved to be weirdly accurate.
Join us now as we gaze into that crystal ball from 1925.
Beauty is skin deep
The future looked ugly to Albert E. Wiggam, an American psychologist. According to his calculations, homely, dull people were having more children than beautiful, intelligent people.
“If we keep progressing in the wrong direction, as we have been doing, American beauty is bound to decline and there won’t be a good-looking girl to be found 100 years from now,” he told an audience in Brooklyn, New York.
Looking around the auditorium, he added: “However, this lack is not apparent yet, especially here in Brooklyn.”
Advanced aging
Thanks to science, people would live to be 150 years old.
Sir Ronald Ross, a British doctor who received the 1902 Nobel Prize in medicine for his studies on malaria, told a London audience that life expectancy would continue to increase because of scientific advances.
“That miraculous progress will not stop,” he said. “A great scientist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris has said that in 100 years time, man should live to the age of 150. Why not?
“A famous American doctor has suggested to me that we should all be immortal. Who can tell what scientific investigation may bring? No one can say how long we may live when we are free from the ravages of germs.”
Rise of the superpowers
English writer H.G. Wells, the author of “The Time Machine,” “The War of the Worlds” and “The Invisible Man,” foretold a new world order for 2025.
Speaking at a dinner gathering at the Hotel Cecil in London, Wells predicted that global power would rest with confederations of people instead of independent countries.
“In a hundred years, there will not be numerous nations, but only three great masses of people — the United States of America, the United States of Europe and China,” he said.
A global government
E.E. Fournier d’Albe, an Irish physicist and chemist, expected a Utopian society for those lucky to be alive in 2025.
In his 1925 book “Quo Vadimus? Some Glimpses of the Future,” he offered examples.
∎ “The earth will be under one government, and one language will be written and understood, or even spoken, all over the globe. There will still be different races and perhaps allied nations, but travel and commerce will be free and unfettered, and calamities will be alleviated and dangers met by the united forces of all mankind.”
∎ “The advances of medicine and surgery will have been such that most of the ailments and limitations of old age will have been eliminated. Life will be prolonged at its maximum of efficiency until death comes like sunset, and is met without pain and without reluctance. There will be no death from disease, and almost any sort of injury will be curable.”
∎ “New fabrics will no doubt be invented, combining the warmth of fur with the softness and flexibility of silk and the strength of linen. Dress will be light, so that half a dozen changes of costume can be carried in a handbag, and will be so designed that each change will involve no more inconvenience than does the removal of a raincoat.”
The future of yesterday
British scientist Archibald M. Low expected the 21st century to offer television machines, breakfast tubes, automatic sleep beds, wireless banking, moving sidewalks and one-piece suits made of artificial felt.
Here are other ideas from Low’s 1925 book “The Future.”
∎ Waking up on time: “A very useful service will be the radio alarm clock. Signals will be sent out at frequent intervals on different wavelengths, say, between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. every morning; and setting the alarm clock to catch the signal at the desired time will avoid any risk of over-sleeping. House and public clocks and even watches will be synchronized by signals sent several times daily, and we shall then know the right time instead of finding a variation of minutes all over a small city.”
∎ Women in science: “Women, owing to their accelerated development, will compete on equal terms with men in all branches of scientific research, resulting in faster progressive developments for health, comfort and speed of thought and life. Many of the new discoveries of the future will doubtless be entirely due to the sex at present referred to as ‘fair’ — a term they will scorn in days of real equality.”
∎ The airport of the future: “The air traveler will walk into a comfortable and well appointed waiting room in the center of the city. An elevator will take him up to the roof where he will step direct into a roomy and really comfortable airplane cabin. There will be no bumping over a hilly airdrome, but the machine, mounted on a turntable, will be shot off into the air by catapults and travel through space at over 300 miles an hour.”
A taste of the tropics
Professor Lowell J. Reed crunched the numbers. Things didn’t look good.
The Johns Hopkins University instructor warned that the United States would face a food shortage in 100 years.
He predicted that the U.S. population would reach 200 million by 2025. Well, he was a little off. It’s now 345 million, give or take. In 1925, it was only 115 million.
Reed said the nation would have to find new sources of food to feed all those mouths.
“This new food supply must be either found in the tropics or provided by processes for making artificial food from organic substances,” Reed told a conference in Williamstown, Massachusetts. “The latter would not be practical unless the cost of chemical processes were rendered much cheaper than they are at present.”
He would probably be relieved to know that modern grocery stores are stocked with tropical fruit and lots of processed food.
New York in 2025
Behold the grandeur of futuristic Manhattan.
H. Winfield Secor, associate editor of Science and Invention magazine, enlisted artist Ray Fardell in 1925 to illustrate “the probable appearance of New York’s skyline in the year 2025.”
Secor predicted that 21st century skyscrapers would climb ever higher, easily doubling the height of the 792-foot, 60-story Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest edifice in 1925.
The sky over New York would be darkened with airplanes, airships and other flying devices. Commuters would travel at least 100 miles to the city via compact and inexpensive “air flivvers.” New York also would offer local subways as well as long-distance subways.
Finally, Secor expected the Big Apple to have triple- and quadruple-decked streets to accommodate the heavy traffic.
“The lower level of future city streets will be occupied by motor trucks, while the level above this will be occupied by lighter vehicles, such as pleasure cars,” Secor wrote. “The sidewalks, some moving type, in the next twenty-five to fifty years, will doubtless be built above the motor vehicle street level and be arranged inside of arcades within the building themselves.
“This will not only enclose the sidewalks at least overhead, as an insurance against rain and snow, but this arrangement will provide much better show window display facilities for stores.”
The city by the bay
Not so fast, New York. Armenian historian Rowell Stratian predicted that San Francisco would be the world’s greatest city by 2025.
As Asian countries gained clout, the Pacific Ocean would overtake the Atlantic Ocean as the great commercial sea, he said. Consequently, New York would play second fiddle to San Francisco and Oakland, California.
“She will be the greatest port of the greatest sea,” Stratian said. “She will be in direct communication with two-thirds of the world’s population.”
He guessed that the Bay Area would boast a population of at least 15 million by 2025. It’s actually closer to half that at 7.7 million.
Divine inspiration
Dr. A.R. Wentz, a professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, anticipated these advances by 2025:
∎ A substitute for sleep would be found. Its chief ingredient would probably be acid sodium phosphate.
∎ Chemistry would be used to produce synthetic foods, making them chiefly out of nitrogen from the atmosphere.
∎ People would use a pocket-sized apparatus for communications to see and hear each other without being in the same room.
∎ There would be world peace, a common world currency and universal free trade.
Great expectations
The Weekly Scotsman, a newspaper published in Edinburgh, made these prophecies:
∎ “The books of A.D. 2025 will probably be printed on nickel leaves, so light and thin that a single volume will contain 30,000 pages, and the pages will be more flexible and durable than paper.”
∎ “The work of the house will be reduced to a negligible quantity by a hundred electrical devices, not a few of which are in use today, from opening the door or removing a meal to cleaning the boots, and the automatic cooking of a six-course dinner.”
∎ “In the world of manufacture, the change will be just as revolutionary. Where we have today a score of machines, one will then suffice. According to Mr. [Thomas] Edison, a century hence we shall put cloth, thread, buttons, and so on into one end of a machine, and from the other end draw suits, complete to the last stitch, and ready folded for delivery.”
The end of poverty
If society made a concerted effort, poverty would be abolished by 2025.
Sophie Irene Loeb, president of the Child Welfare Committee of America, said the continued advancement of widow pensions and child welfare laws would help achieve that goal. Once juvenile poverty was eliminated, the next step would be to address poverty among adults.
“There should be no pauper child in this country, and no able-bodied child should be anywhere except in its home,” Loeb said. “The children — our future citizens — need, and are entitled to, not charity, but a chance.”
Knee-slappers from 1925
∎ “Horse-drawn vehicles are fast disappearing from our streets, but jackass-driven automobiles will still be with us 100 years from now.”
∎ “The daily and hourly progress of madness and folly and wickedness will at least make a fine narrative in history. But probably the people of the future will have so many follies of their own that they will not care greatly for ours in 2025.”
∎ “Now a scientist declares there will be nothing to laugh about 100 years hence. We suppose that means 100 years from now there will be no bowlegged girls in short skirts or skinny shanked men in golf togs.”
∎ “Those who fear that the world will be overpopulated a century hence may underestimate the capacity of moonshine.”
∎ They are now celebrating the 100th anniversary of the invention of the detachable collar. Judging from the popularity of divorce, 100 years from now, they will be celebrating the invention of the detachable marriage yoke.”
A little humor
The Lassen Advocate, a newspaper in Susanville, California, published this joke in 1925:
It was in the year 2025. The United States had just elected its first woman president.
“Don’t you feel that your home life will be ruined?” the Inquiring Reporter asked her husband.
“My only regret,” he said with a sign, “is that I have but one wife to give to my country.”
For better or verse
And, finally, we have this.
Vivian Gaulke, an eighth grade pupil at Franklin School in Wausau, Wisconsin, wrote this poem for a 1925 class assignment.
We hope she earned a good grade.
THE WORLD IN 2025
How will the world look a century from now?
I have seen it in crystalized glass.
The marvelous wonders which men will perform
In a hundred years to pass.
The radio then will be nothing but play.
The movies will cease to exist.
If people could see things a century from now,
They’d lament at the joys they had missed.
In a century hence the airplanes and such
Will be had by the poorest of beings.
Science will scorn them as we scorn the chaise
And, instead, invent wonderful things.
The folks in a century will know what’s on Mars.
They’ll send messages up to the moon.
The cars of today will be laughed at by them.
They’ll make fun of our soaring balloons.
There will be wonderful machines, tonics and herbs,
Which will cure almost any disease.
There will be wonder foods — and beverages, too,
Which will outdo our coffees and teas.
In a century from now, the hard working wife
Will have nothing to do but rest.
For her work will be done in a few minutes’ time
If simply a button is pressed.
The men in the factories won’t have much to do.
They will just superintend their machine.
When they think of men laboring as some do today
They will wonder why we were so “green.”
This is all I can see in my crystalized glass
Of the old world in one hundred years.
But I hope I’m not living a century from now
For my dullness would move me to tears.
Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com
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This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Predictions about 2025 from 100 years ago
