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Title: Thomas Edison Predictions for The year 2011.
Source: io9.com
URL Source: http://io9.com/5741015/the-year-201 ... rding-to-thomas-edison-in-1911
Published: Jan 25, 2011
Author: ?
Post Date: 2011-01-25 20:49:03 by Armadillo
Keywords: None
Views: 239
Comments: 4

100 years ago, the Miami Metropolis newspaper published Thomas Edison's musings on the far-off future of 2011. According to the famed inventor, we should be driving around in solid gold taxis.

What will the world be a hundred years hence?
None but a wizard dare raise the curtain and disclose the secrets of the future; and what wizard can do it with so sure a hand as Mr. Thomas Alva Edison, who has wrested so many secrets from jealous Nature? He alone of all men who live has the necessary courage and gift of foresight, and he has not shrunk from the venture.
Already, Mr. Edison tells us, the steam engine is emitting its last gasps. A century hence it will be as remote as antiquity as the lumbering coach of Tudor days, which took a week to travel from Yorkshire to London. 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.
But the traveler of the future, says a writer in Answers, will largely scorn such earth crawling. 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.
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 cradle; his 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.
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.
Already Mr. Edison can produce a pound weight of these nickel leaves, more flexible than paper and ten times as durable, at a cost of five shillings. In a hundred years' time the cost will probably be reduced to a tenth.
More amazing still, this American wizard sounds the death knell of gold as a precious metal. "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."
Before long it will be an easy matter to convert a truck load of iron bars into as many bars of virgin gold.
In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern; why we should not ride in golden taxicabs, or substituted gold for steel in our drawing room suites. Only steel will be the more durable, and thus the cheaper in the long run.

Poster Comment:

He was right about steam engines, electricity, hydraulics, and air travel.
He was wrong about steel furnishings (everything's plastic now), books having nickel pages, and gold.
And how could he not foresee "Angry Birds", "Farmville", and iPod.

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#1. To: Armadillo (#0)

The should have interviewed Tesla........

" If you cannot govern yourself, you will be governed by assholes. " Randge, Poet de Forum, 1/11/11

abraxas  posted on  2011-01-25   20:52:52 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

(everything's plastic now)

Henry Ford was early and very much into plastics.

Today the United States has only 11,670,000 manufacturing jobs, less than 9 per cent of total jobs. Yet, despite America’s heavy dependence on foreign manufactures and foreign creditors, the idiots in Washington think that they are a superpower standing astride the world like a colossus. P. C. Roberts 1/11

iconoclast  posted on  2011-01-25   21:16:58 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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

Wow, if this is really form him, then he wasn't really that smart at all, just incredibly persistent. Converting iron into gold requires vasts amounts of energy which far exceeds the value of the gold produced.

God is always good!

RickyJ  posted on  2011-01-26   0:19:21 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

The should have interviewed Tesla........

Edison was a huckster

46;"Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end. "

Rube Goldberg  posted on  2011-01-26   6:09:19 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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