100 Years Ago Deep Thinkers Predicted Life in 2025

Nearly a century years ago, various scientists, doctors and deep thinkers dared to imagine what life would be like in 2025. Some proved to be weirdly accurate.

Mobile Tech: Dr. A.R. Wentz, a professor at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, predicted that, by 2025, people would use a pocket-sized apparatus for communications to see and hear each other without being in the same room, and that chemistry would be used to produce synthetic foods, making them chiefly out of nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Women in Science: 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. He also predicted: “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.”

New Fabrics: E.E. Fournier d’Albe, an Irish physicist and chemist, expected a Utopian society for those lucky to be alive in 2025. Amongst his predictions: “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.”

Rise of Superpowers: English writer H.G. Wells, the author of “The War of the Worlds” foretold a new world order for 2025. Speaking at a dinner 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.”

American Beauty: 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.

Science & Aging: 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?"

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