10 predictions that Watkins got right...
"1. Digital colour photography
Watkins did not, of course, use the word "digital" or spell out precisely how digital cameras and computers would work, but he accurately predicted how people would come to use new photographic technology.
A scan of the original article can be found online"Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.... photographs will reproduce all of nature's colours."
This showed major foresight, says Mr Nilsson. When Watkins was making his predictions, it would have taken a week for a picture of something happening in China to make its way into Western papers.
People thought photography itself was a miracle, and colour photography was very experimental, he says.
"The idea of having cameras gathering information from opposite ends of the world and transmitting them - he wasn't just taking a present technology and then looking to the next step, it was far beyond what anyone was saying at the time."
Patrick Tucker from the World Future Society, based in Maryland in the US, thinks Watkins might even be hinting at a much bigger future breakthrough.
"'Photographs will be telegraphed' reads strikingly like how we access information from the web," says Mr Tucker."
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and four he didn't:
"3. No more cars in large cities
"All hurry traffic will be below or above ground when brought within city limits."
However, many cities do have pedestrian zones in their historic centres. And he correctly forecast elevated roads and subways."
BBC News - Ten 100-year predictions that came true
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3 comments:
"No more cars in large cities" - wishful thinking maybe...? How wonderful if we could make that happen...Happy PFF!
I read that article the other day and was really surprised at the ones that did come true, considering it was 100 years ago.
Fine idea for a news item, and for a post. Recently, I tried to read a futuristic Jules Verne novel. His ideas were interesting and predicted many things that would happen decades later for real, but the story itself was quite boring, unlike the 1950's films that were based on Verne's novels. I loved these.
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