this image comes from a series produced circa 1900 by a german chocolate company, predicting what the year 2000 might look like.
I blog this as it’s the second view of the year 2000 from 1900 that i’ve seen this week. This is a list of how things would look in 2000, published in a women’s magazine, entitled “What may happen in the next hundred years”. Amongst the predictions:
The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare.
Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.
There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic.
Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated.
There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.
Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box.
Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.
There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated.
