“Never make predictions, especially about the future”*…
Leonard Richardson likes old books of futurism. In 2008, he borrowed one from a friend, a classic from 1967: The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, by Herman Kahn and A. J. Wiener. Richardson color-coded the authors’ predictions, summarized in three tables near the front of the book, with his subjective impressions of whether each was a hit, a partial hit, or a miss. For example…
Table XVIII: One Hundred Technical Innovations Very Likely in the Last Third of the Twentieth Century
- Multiple applications of lasers and masers for sensing, measuring, communication, cutting, heating, welding, power transmission, ilumination, destructive (defensive), and other purposes
- Extreme high-strength and/or high-temperature structural materials
- New or improved superperformance fabrics (papers, fibers, and plastics)
- New or improved materials for equipment and appliances (plastic, glasses, alloys, ceramics, intermetallics, and cements)
- New airborne vehicles (ground-effect machines, VTOL and STOL, super-helicopters, giant and/or supersonic jets)
- Extensive commercial application of shaped-charge explosives
- More reliable and longer-range weather forecasting
- Intensive and/or extensive expansion of tropical agriculture and forestry
- New sources of power for fixed installations (e.g., magnetohydrodynamic, thermionic and thermoelectric, and radioactivity)
- New sources of power for ground transportation (storage battery, fuel cell, propulsion [or support] by electro-magnetic fields, jet engine, turbine, and the like)
Out of 135 predictions there are 27 hits and 22 partial hits. Read the three lists in their entirety at “The Year 2000“… then ponder what our lists, looking out to 2045-2050, might contain.
* Casey Stengel
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As raise our eyes to the horizon, we might send mutable birthday greetings to Leonidas Frank “Lon” Cheney; he was born on this date in 1883. The son of two deaf parents, Cheney was skilled at pantomime from an early age, a talent he parlayed into a successful vaudeville act. A scandal (his first wife’s attempted suicide) forced him from the theater into the nascent film industry– where he became a successful character actor. Cheney developed deep skills in make-up to complement his pantomime skills, and created some of the most memorable characters in the golden age of silent film– among them, The Phantom of the Opera and Quasimodo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). In an interview reviewing his work in over 100 films, Chaney referred to his gifts in using make-up and contortion to portray his subjects as “extraordinary characterization”; in the industry he was known simply as “the man of 1,000 faces.”
Cheney in The Phantom of the Opera