“One Hundred Years Hence”: Victorians predicting future technological wonders | Hacker News Reader

“One Hundred Years Hence”: Victorians predicting future technological wonders

ephemerasociety.org

73 pointssamclemens38 comments

I'd be interested in seeing a list of how each of these was achieved, not achieved, kinda achieved, or other (based on a major misconception?).

For example, for the first series:

Aerial navigation: achieved, but not as convenient and ubiquitous as suggested

City Improvements up to date: not achieved, although it's possible to move individual homes and buildings at great expense, and you can buy deliberately-portable ones for certain uses

Shopping made easy — moving sidewalks: achieved, but not as convenient and ubiquitous as suggested

Summer excursions to the North Pole: marginally achieved, but not regularly commercially available; also, the image's notion of "North Pole" seems to be "inhabited Arctic regions" which are not, in fact, the North Pole

Concert and Opera at Home: achieved (and how!)

No more Droughts. Rainmaking machines at work: not achieved (unreliable and expensive rainmaking technology doesn't prevent droughts)

Dispensing with Bridge and ferry: marginally achieved, but not convenient or popular for most purposes; http://hydrobikes.com/ is really awesome but still expensive and most people don't have somewhere to store one, and other waterwalking apparatus is generally in the same boat (if you'll pardon the pun)

New uses for Roentgen rays: achieved (!!), though not all forms are routinely available for civilian law enforcement use

Roofed cities, fine weather insured: not achieved

Submarine Excursions: achieved, but much less convenient and ubiquitous than suggested

Cruisers evading an enemy: not achieved, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUKW (on a much smaller scale)

It would be neat to see this kind of analysis for all of the other sets they've collected.

If I think of the scale of our buildings, combined with the protection of automobiles, I feel like we've sort of achieved roofed cities.

You can drive your car from your garage to underground parking at your enormous Apple spaceship campus where you work, eat, and exercise under one roof. Then you can drive to the mall where you work, shop, and watch movies under one roof. Then you drive home. You're never exposed to the rain.

Obviously this doesn't apply to most people but shopping malls is what got me thinking.

With the aid of a guidebook ("Cities without Ground", ISBN 1935935321) I have crossed central Hong Kong on foot, above street level, from rail station to mall to office and hotel and residential building and been under cover the whole distance. Similarly I've walked underground in Taipei and Tokyo for kilometers, surfacing entirely out of choice for a glimpse of sky, to remind myself this isn't Trantor after all.

These are cities where it is a common experience to arrive at the airport, take the train into town, and never leave cover for the whole duration of a stay.

It may not all the be same roof, but the permanently covered urban life is a reality today.

+1 for comparing to Trantor rather than Coruscant

Yes. I think it's fair to say that structural paradigms above and beyond the concepts of "roof" and "city" have emerged that have fundamentally changed the nature of this prediction.

Perhaps unintentionally, this leads us towards a different model for making and assessing long-term technology predictions in the first place. Instead of making literal predictions based on form ("a roofed city"), we should make predictions based on function or goal ("effective shielding from inclement weather throughout the day"). Of course, even this framework doesn't protect us from the changing nature of needs and functions over time.

That's a good point. And it's really impressive how far you can walk without being exposed to the sky in central Boston or Singapore (or, I've heard, in Montréal).

Or the MIT campus with its tunnels (you can walk from building 1 to E19 without going outside, which I will probably do when visiting in January to avoid the cold weather).

https://whereis.mit.edu/

Montreal is sort-of partially-roofed by the ground. Designed to allow travel between shops, and perhaps home & work even in the event of heavy snowfall I believe.

http://montrealvisitorsguide.com/the-underground-city-map/

I'd argue it's totally not achieved.

Instead we achieved an alternative that does the same thing.

A classic example of how these articles miss what in hindsight is obvious.

Mega projects hard.

Small component built projects easier.

The moving sidewalk shown, with parallel sections at different speeds, follows the design from the Paris Exhibition of 1900.[1] It seems to have worked well there, but nothing like it was ever built again. That moving sidewalk is not a belt; it's an endless train of flatcars with turntables between them.

It's disappointing that someone hasn't built a glass-roofed city by now. Google was getting close in 2015, with their glass-roofed campus plan, but the city of Mountain View decided not to let them build it. Google admitted that the roof technology wasn't proven yet.

The USSR built an armed cruiser that can move from the sea to land - the Zubr class hovercraft. Not for evading an enemy, for invading the land.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjpCVQgKZsc [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ0aqx6_5YE

I can just imagine Elijah Baley zipping around that boardwalk.

Yes, that's where Asimov and Heinlein ("The Roads Must Roll") got the idea.

> Shopping made easy — moving sidewalks: achieved, but not as convenient and ubiquitous as suggested

Internet shopping is way more convenient than using moving sidewalks :)

There are a lot of fun predictions. Ggl "1900 OR 19th.century predictions". Though they're now much less accessible than before Google news archive died, and the past was paywalled.:/

I'd love to see a taxonomy of prediction failure. What were the underlying ideas, and how did they go wrong. Ideas limited/blocked/displaced/abandoned due to technological/economic/market/social issues missed because ..., or some such.

One thing to note is just how poor the analysis of old predictions is. It requires both engineering and historical expertise to address "why did US buildings stop being connected by bridges?" or "on what are robot arms (still) bottlenecked?".

My fuzzy recollection is Peter Norvig gave a 'you can't predict the future' talk which dissed Ladies Home Journal(?) for 'no more horses'. And there's a lot of "the future / new tech is unpredicatable/surprising" which doesn't get questioned with a "So you follow science research? No. The engineering literature? No. The industry press? No. What part of your being surprised by technological change strikes you as surprising? Well, people in my echo chamber didn't parrot anything about it!" Sigh.

For the droughts, in desert regions today desalination is a way to reliably produce water, not depending on mother nature.

For the roofed cities, we have built airconditioned megamalls / underground shopping malls, so we do not have to be exposed.

City Improvements up to date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago

Chicago got rearranged, with buildings raised up and some moved around in the 1850s-60s. The creator of that card may have been thinking of something similar becoming commonplace.

Aerial navigation: Maybe the failure mode was missing the floor on balloon size? If unobtainium balloons that size existed, then yes, Model T blimp. Outboard fishing blimp. Wind/weather becomes an airplane-sized issue. Perhaps they over-extrapolated from shrinking sizes (lighter construction, hotter air and hydrogen) to 'becomes boat-like'?

City Improvements up to date: Hmm. Cities had a lot more open space. And to build a building, you put in a rail line to the site. Now moving even a small woodframe, requires taking down poles and avoiding bridges[1]. IC and steelframe made construction cheaper. But, http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm . And current manufactured and modular homes. So it works for small buildings. The pictured block-size construction seems implausible for stress scaling. Economics didn't work for new large buildings? And no room to slide away old large buildings?

Shopping made easy: Maintenance nightmare, especially outside. Boston subway escalators were biting a person every few days, before brushes were added a few years ago. Consolidation of small shops into department stores and then malls (which did/do have escalators, but no/few walkways even now). But small shops continued until 1950's in midtown Manhattan. With lots of elevated trains, thinking "and soon there will be something like it at ground level" doesn't seem implausible. But rail is a tech sweet spot. Why doesn't NYC 5th avenue now have an airport-like walkway? Lack of crowd backpressure from corners? So maybe the failure mode was to greatly underestimate cost, plus safety?

[1] picture of a house being trucked: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/historic-kirkland-h... Another http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2709261/Moving-house...

Irrigation has more or less removed drought as a major issue in the US. We build city's in deserts and grow crops practically independent of rainfall.

This is currently based on unsustainable water useage patterns, but there is also little point to leaving water underground.

but there is also little point to leaving water underground.

Seriously? http://www.actforlibraries.org/importance-of-aquifers/

Your link doesn't seem to provide any evidence that leaving the water underground would be beneficial. Depleting aquifers is only bad because once it's dry we can't use it anymore. So as long as using it now is at least as good as using it later...

> Irrigation has more or less removed drought as a major issue in the US.

Heard of California? :)

Ahh California, where they grow Alfalfa in the middle of a Drought for export. Sounds like things are just fine.

PS: California's problem is not drought, it's poor water policy.

Aside from the main theme of what has / hasn't been realised technologically, I also find it a fascinating lesson in how society has changed, that these drawings almost exclusively feature families and extended groups of people engaging with modern inventions together.

In contrast, a huge proportion of modern advertising, especially for consumer technology products, depicts an individual interacting alone. It's not just the funny tech predictions, nor just the quaint clothing, that provide for anachronism and sober reflection in this collection.

Very interestig.

Though, let's not forget, these things probably weren't drawn by the smartest people in the world. Many of them might look silly not because they were drawn long ago, or because it's so impossible to predict the future, but because they were created by an artist at an ad agency, not a scientist or an engineer.

Right now, the future predicted by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, or Elon Musk would probably be very different, and much more accurate, than the future drawn for a magazine by an artist.

They missed it by 50 years, but sure, people will be summering in the North Pole in no time.

I enjoyed this but found the word "Victorian" in the title (it appears once in the article too) odd since I have only used that term to refer to mid-end 19th century UK & Empire. This article had a wider and more interesting scope.

Queen Victoria died in 1901 and most of the empire was still part of the empire by then.

That's true but Belgium, Germany, USA etc which are most of the presentation were not "victorian".

Typically, when people think about the future, they think about what they're doing today and how technology could transform that.

But when predicting the future, you need to figure out what we won't do anymore because of technology.

Nice. I hadn't seen the US ones before. The French series, "En L'An 2000", is well-known, and Wikimedia Commons has most of those cards at high resolution.

We've achieved a lot of things they couldn't possibly imagine. Here's hoping we achieve things in 100 yrs we can't even dream of today.

http://europe.newsweek.com/command-control-donald-trump-nucl...

"Why any one of these incidents hasn’t ended in a mass disaster is “pure luck,” Schlosser says in the film. “And the problem with luck is it eventually runs out.” Think about your laptop or car, he suggests. “Nuclear weapons are machines,” he says. “And every machine ever invented eventually goes wrong.”"

http://thebulletin.org/press-release/doomsday-clock-hands-re...

“Three minutes (to midnight) is too close. Far too close. We, the members of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,want to be clear about our decision not to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock in 2016: That decision is not good news, but an expression of dismay that world leaders continue to fail to focus their efforts and the world's attention on reducing the extreme danger posed by nuclear weapons and climate change. When we call these dangers existential, that is exactly what we mean: They threaten the very existence of civilization and therefore should be the first order of business for leaders who care about their constituents and their countries.”

I have personally started to worry always more about the catastrophic software failures. At least here on HN there are people who react to my comments who typically haven't even heard about the concept of developing with the goal of the fault tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tolerance advocating instead the beloved "fail early fail often" as the best default even when the topic is actually controlling the rockets(!)

http://thebulletin.org/who-would-destroy-world10253

"An existential catastrophe could only happen once in our history. This raises the stakes immensely, and it means that reacting to existential risks won’t work. Humanity must anticipate such risks to avoid them."

Does "fail early fail often" necessarily lead to fault intolerance and non-robustness?

Had you read my link you'd know that "fault tolerant" means the system which continues to do its job even when some components of it already failed. The system designed to "fail early" simply fails by default. There's simply no attitude of "do as much of the work no matter how many components already failed" or "making my part failing as seldom as possible." Not the mention actually designing the active recovery process, the complete opposite of "fail early":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTs8ywKQsI

Compare that approach with the handling of the water in the Fukushima electrical generators, situated on the edge of the ocean.

But even with all the possible care, accidents do happen. Some possibility will remain unaccounted.

So the only good approach is to have so little nuclear weapons that the accidents, when they happen, and they surely will happen, still don't destroy the humanity. The goal must be "fault tolerance" on the civilization level.

Or there won't be any civilization left.

The same stands for handling the global warming.

Dispensing with Bridge and ferry seems like a step (no pun intended) backwards.

This was during the buildout of US city transportation infrastructure, including bridges, but still with compact commutes. So "I want to go just over there. I can see it. If the river was frozen I could easily walk it. Instead, time/expense/unpleasantness/hazard."

Modern equivalents might be "the door is right there... but I need to find parking", "I'm going half a mile to shop on the other side of this Appalachian hill... it's a half hour fast drive", "I'm going just across this bay... it's a two hour commute", "I'm taking public transit from point A to nearby B... but because of route topology and schedules, I'll travel 10 times as far, and take longer than if I could go direct, crawling". Fast automotive transportation has duck taped a lot of infrastructure gaps.

for all the foresight of technology, it strikes me most that the clothing would remain the same.

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