Forecasts of 1923
Blackened teeth, four-hour work days: How people imagined the year 2023 100 years ago
“No more hard work in 2023!”: Paul Fairie has collected hundred-year-old forecasts for the new year and published them on Twitter
© Screenshot Twitter account Paul Fairie
University of Calgary’s Paul Fairie researched 100-year-old newspapers for predictions about the year 2023. The results of his search make you smile – and marvel.
What will 2023 look like? I’m sure many people asked themselves that at the turn of the year. But even a hundred years ago, scientists and sociologists were already thinking about how people will probably live in 2023. Paul Fairie, senior research fellow at the University of Calgary in Canada, has searched hundred-year-old newspapers and magazines for their forecasts and has uncovered some rather curious but surprisingly realistic predictions.
His finds published Fairie on Twitter. These include different forecasts of life expectancy, forecasts of population growth, trends in personal hygiene, but also advances in travel or healthcare, as well as thoughts on the future of communication. Here you are:
- “No more hard work in 2023!”. Thanks to electricity, a working day will only have four hours.
- “Women will probably shave their heads.” And as the “climax of personal styling” their “teeth blackened”.
- Men will curl up.
- There will be fewer doctors and current diseases will be unknown. Besides, all people will be beautiful. “Beauty pageants will be superfluous as there will be so many beautiful people that it will be almost impossible to pick a winner.”
- “Cancer, tuberculosis, polio, musculoskeletal ataxia and leprosy will be eradicated.”
- “The average human lifespan could be increased to 100 years.” In individual cases, even 150 or 200 years could be possible.
- “The average length of a human life will be 300 years.”
- “Kidney warmers will be worn to protect the kidneys on cold days, just as a teapot is kept warm by a tea snuggly in the north.”
- There will be 300,000,000 people living in the USA (actually there are around 331,900,000).
- Canada will be home to 100,000,000 people (actually around 38,250,000).
- “Tools and dwellings are made largely of pulp and cement to utilize plants and rocks in any state of decay, ordinary waste, or uselessness.”
- “A polar airline will be opened, making flights across the North Pole from Chicago to Hamburg possible in 18 hours” (actually it’s about 11.5 hours)
- In aviation, radiation will replace gasoline as a fuel and “the sky will be filled with countless vehicles sailing along precisely defined routes”.
- “The private kitchen will disappear. Tomorrow’s foods will be flavored and prepared according to chemical formulas that preserve the freshness of fruit and meat, stripping them of indigestible properties and bringing them to the table ready to eat.”
- “We don’t start the day by reading world news, but by listening to it, because newspapers went out of business more than 50 years ago.”
- “Watch-sized cellular phones will keep everyone connected to the end of the world.”
- “The 2023 war will of course be a wireless war. […] Wireless telephony, sight, heat, power and writing can all play important roles.”
- “It is quite possible that mental telepathy is already in the bud and is a very useful method of communication.”
“I thought it might be fun to look at what people thought about 2023, but it was 100 years ago,” Fairie told National Public Radio. “Browsing through archives is a fun hobby – it’s incredibly relaxing to read about what people were thinking decades ago.”
Many of the predictions are about things that worried people then and are still a source of concern for some today, the researcher said. For example, the prediction that men will curl up seems to stem from a “general concern about anything that challenges gender norms,” while the prediction of a four-hour workday appears to be part of a larger discussion about the benefits of automation .
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Given the mix of very daring predictions of the future, like communication through telepathy, and very real ones, like the watch-sized cellular phone, Fairie says his most important lesson is “that one should be humble about the certainty of predictions over a hundred years concerns”. “If I’ve learned anything from this compilation, it’s that I have absolutely no idea what it will be like a century from now.”