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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much spot-on apart from the strange (and repeated) prediction of giant fruits and vegetables (I guess you could say the green revolution provided similar quantity, if not on a per-fruit basis) and the failure to predict the popularity of air travel.

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My favorite swing and miss:

Prediction #3: Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.

More or less a hit on the prevalence of gyms, total miss on the ramifications!

It is not as swing and miss if you remember that 1900s was the dawn of Eugenics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics) -- the selection and breeding of a superior humans, a country of healthy, youthful and perfect men and women...

We often forget that America and Britain were very much in love with Eugenics. Unfortunately that is probably not something included in the high-school history curriculum...

Search for footage of the controversial "Olympia" by Leni Riefenstahl it typifies the mood and the idea...

Not as much a miss as you portray, considering that: 1. It is mandatory at least one Physical Education class in public high schools (at least in Florida), and if I remember right, middle school as well.

2. Not only do colleges and universities have complete gymnasiums, many of them have enormous staudiums and fields.

The one miss that I do agree with is "A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling."

That's the big miss. The people from 1900 would be shocked at how fat we are, not how strong we are.

My son goes to a public middle school in Colorado, and each student only has Physical Education for half the year. They also only study foreign language for half a year. The two halves of the student body trade at mid-year. The academic schedule is too busy to allow for all-year PE and FL.

I expect PE to be uncommon some time soon-ish. Besides, PE is too hard when you're fat.

Yes that was the oddest one. It was odd to me as it seemed to be inspired by progress in agriculture, pestacides, farming practices etc... but they went (repeatedly) for size over quantity (which seems odd to us today).

the failure to predict the popularity of air travel

Considering that this was written two years before the Wright Brothers got their plane off the ground, it's understandable.

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