John Kelly
The Washington Post, March 8 2022
As I gazed at the blurry scan of the 100-year-old newspaper page on my computer, I started to wonder if what I saw was some kind of joke: a hack of the newspaper archives or a mind game from a puckish time traveler.
“Novelist Visions World of Year 2022,” read the headline on the May 7, 1922, article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. It was above the sort of story editors like to assign and readers like to read: predictions of the future.
But this one was … different. English writer W.L. George had gotten nearly all of it right, from how long it would take an airplane to fly between New York and London in 2022 (“It could take as little as eight hours,” George wrote), to decreasing reliance on coal as a fuel (“a great deal of power will be obtained from radium … while it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed”); from legalized birth control to motion pictures that had sound — and color!
“When one can not prophesy, one may guess,” George wrote, “especially if one is sure of being out of the way when the reckoning comes. Therefore it is without anxiety that I suggest a picture of this world a hundred years hence.”
George was 40 when he wrote his futurecast. I’d never heard of him before. He published more than two dozen books but didn’t attain the lasting fame of H.G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw. He died in 1926, just four years after his predictions were published.
Silver Spring reader Michael Ravnitzky pointed me toward George’s 1922 essay, originally published by the New York Herald. It appeared in newspapers across the country, sometimes illustrated with drawings possibly meant to convey the outlandishness of the prediction: a female politician orating in Congress, for example.
George felt the world wouldn’t change as much between 1922 and 2022 as it had between 1822 and 1922. “[The] world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, etc.”
He began with technology. Planes would replace both steamships and long-distance trains. Trucks would probably replace freight trains. Communications technologies such as the telephone would go “wireless.” Wrote George: “the people of the year 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky.”
Improvements in the movies — in “natural colors,” with actors speaking “with ordinary voices” — would threaten stage plays.
George wasn’t right about everything. He thought most people in 2022 would opt for “synthetic” food in the form of pills. And he believed houses would be easier to clean, not because of robotic vacuum cleaners, but because of reduced coal smoke.
Also, he wrote, the floors and walls will be made of compressed papier-mâché, bound with brass or taping along the edge.
Rather than scrub the floor or wall, homeowners of the future would simply unscrew the brass and peel off the dirty paper, revealing the clean layer below.
George expected the family to change, with the state taking on many aspects of child-rearing. An avowed feminist, George said societal improvement would be dependent on how women were treated.
“It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded that idea that they are primarily ‘makers of men,’” he wrote. “Most fit women will then be following an individual career. … The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.”
But progress would be slow, he cautioned, writing “a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery.”
Nations would still go to war, but maybe less frequently and in a more limited fashion.
“I suspect that those wars to come will be made horrible beyond my conception by new poison gases, inextinguishable flames and lightproof smoke clouds,” he wrote. “In those wars, the airplane bomb will seem as out of date as is today the hatchet.”
If George was wrong in places, it was, I think because he was too optimistic. He believed the United States would be more “settled” in 2022. The zeal that drove the pioneers across the continent would be exhausted. Instead of scrapping for wealth, Americans would put that energy toward producing art and literature.
He predicted “a great liberalism of mind” and a sort of national homogeneity. “The American from Key West and American from Seattle will be much the same kind of man,” he wrote.
There was a tinge of nostalgia in George’s prose, a nostalgia for a future he would not know. “The sad thing about discovery,” he wrote, “is that it works toward its own extinction and that the more we discover the less there is left.”
I’m happy to have discovered W.L. George.
No comments:
Post a Comment