Archibald Low's ‘ruthlessly imaginative’ 1925 predictions come true, mostly | Hacker News Reader

Archibald Low's ‘ruthlessly imaginative’ 1925 predictions come true, mostly

theguardian.com

59 pointsggm20 comments

1925 was late to be predicting the escalator. Macy's in New York not only had escalators by then, they're still there and functioning. The first escalator dates back to the late 19th century. Moving sidewalks first appeared at the Paris Exposition in 1900, and that was probably the best implementation of the concept.

This article seems to be an ad for some genealogy service, picked up and copied into the Guardian as filler. It's a low point for a once renowned newspaper.

Somewhat related, "paternoster" segmented elevators from the 1860s. In a way an escalator is similar, except there are no walls or ceilings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift

I was using a Paternoster ever day until last year, I really miss it. When you happened to miss your exit it would just revolve around on the other side and you would have to wait an entire round to try your exist again.

Moving sidewalks appeared at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago

https://chicagology.com/columbiaexpo/fair030/

> Moving sidewalks first appeared at the Paris Exposition in 1900,

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=763664624365076

Here's the original patent for 'revolving stairs' from 1859: https://patents.google.com/patent/US25076A/en

Most of these things seem hardly out there in the context of when he made them.

Well working on r&d for a television he predicted people would use TV for news? Like if you already invented a tv, that seems like the most obvious use.

During the high point of first wave feminism and changing gender roles, he predicted that woman wearing pants might become the norm...

He predicted wind power despite wind power having been used for hundreds of years by this point.

He predicted "Life is to be made far easier by the use of machinery that will do all the heavy and disagreeable work.” in the middle of that already starting to happen (the industrial revolution was already well over at this point)

To be sure, its easy to look back and think things are obvious. Plenty of people of that time would have said the opposite. However its not like these predictions were out of left field for the time.

I don't know, Mussolini had been in power for only 3 years. He was still far from making the trains run on Thyme...

Just fantastic pun there. Despite all HN living at the forefront of technology, we still have to appreciate a groan inducing good pun

Honestly, I think it's downright dishonest to talk about someone's predictions for what the future would look like and never actually show what their predictions were. This case is particularly annoying, because it's a newspaper summarizing a blog post that's summarizing the original predictions, so there's no actual direct quotations in the article linked here. Although even the originating blog post carries minimal quotations, with such that it does have so thoroughly trimmed that it's hard to actually ascertain what the predictions were in the first place.

Although in one case--the claim of predicting the escalator--the original quotation is not so thoroughly clipped to prevent the assignment of the escalator to the prediction is laughably false:

> [...] lift to the door of his office! If he has to go anywhere on foot moving sidewalks will save him exertion. In his office there will be good automatic telephones, which will get the right number every time! If in [...]

Even the brevity of the clip seems clear that the idea is that moving sidewalks would be the norm in cities as a form of public transport, as opposed to the situation today where moving sidewalks are largely limited to airports and complex train stations, where gates may be some distance. The closest equivalent I can think of is Hong Kong's use of the escalator in a few streets as public transport. Given that moving sidewalks were debuted at least 30 years before the prediction, it should be obvious that the prediction wasn't their existence but their ubiquity.

In general, a lot of these "old futurists correctly predicted the modern world!" types of articles tend to rely very heavily on misinterpreting the predictions to be able to grade them correct, which is why I'm frustrated when the articles don't even bother to source the predictions in their entirety.

The prediction of herbs as street lights is not far off since now scientists are working on glow in the dark trees.

https://theweek.com/articles/763908/glowinthedark-trees-coul...

Its kind of unclear what the actual prediction was.

I couldn't find the prediction regarding magic light herbs, but i did find a related prediction about light where it kind of sounds like he is predicting LEDs if you stretch it a bit

"By the further study of the motion of the electron, means may be discovered whereby the preliminary heating of filaments in our modern gas filled lamps may be totally replaced by a controlled discharge producing oscillation of some impalpable material and giving us the sensation of illumination. "

> some impalpable material

"impalpable" means you can't touch it. Like a low pressure gas? Neon lighting fits this. "brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases"

And "It was discovered in 1898"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_lighting

I’ve got firefly petunias, and while cool as hell, IRL they are very dim. (Most of the time at least. There are occasional days they are especially active). You need to have either no or low competing light, and be somewhat dark adapted to see them. A street light 2 houses away can completely drown them out so that you’d need to put them in your shadow to see. Note that the still curled up new flower buds are the brightest, and more comparable to glow powder that was charged and left to dim for an hour.

It’s very difficult to actually take a picture of them to accurately show the level of glow. Either your camera is unable to focus on them, or it does too good a job at amplifying the low light, making them seem way more impressive than they are.

Fundamentally, emitting light has a significant cost in ATP, so it’s not practical to simply tell the plant to dump more energy into doing so. A smarter person than me might be able to estimate how many luminaries you’d get per some unit of ATP. Firefly petunias also need full sun throughout the day large or they get leggy and don’t do great.

There are a few things which could make plants as lights more conceivable:

1. Somehow fixing the release of luciferase enzymes to dark conditions only (currently the glowing is always active). I have bioluminescent dinoflagellates that only glow during the times they expect it to be dark, because that’s when they’ll release an enzyme when disturbed. In contract to my petunias, these are very bright, enough to read with, for a single second anyways.

2. Somehow modifying the cellular structures to allow more light to escape like actual fireflies. (https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/firefly-inspired-sur...) Currently much of the light is reabsorbed internally, and this only gets worse with pigments as shown with crossbreeding with other colored petunias. (https://old.reddit.com/r/FireflyPetunia/)

Both of these things are going to be extremely hard.

All that being said, yeah I’d love turning every plant in a park from grass to trees a glowing equivalent, but I’d not ever expect them to provide street lamp level of light. But if you have an area that becomes too dark to see the grass and aren’t going to put up lights anyways, then that’d be a perfect place for such plants.

Glowing plants would have seemed a much more practical light source in an era where moonlight towers were still in recent, widespread use. Night generally was much more dim than we're used to today.

Archibald Low published a book in 1922 titled The Future. Courtesy of the Digital Library of India and the Internet Archive, here are some excerpts:

“One of the greatest blessings of television will be to bring the most expensive educational facilities within the reach of all, and the creation of a mental aristocracy. Specialists lecturing at one university or school will have a vast audience, for any number of other schools could be linked up by wireless, enabling the pupils to follow the lecture, both by the spoken word and of the reproduction of diagrams upon the wireless controlled blackboard.”

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22805/page/n61...

“Science may place at the disposal of future men forces so great that an entire army or city could be annihilated in a second, and it is little exaggeration to state that if the gifts of science were grossly misused man might entirely disappear from the world.”

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22805/page/n73...

“During his dressing and quickly dispatched breakfast snack, a pleasant toned loud speaker will keep [the man of the future] informed of all the world’s happenings, while his television machine will give him glimpses of the events mentioned in the news. By altering the wave length on his directional short wave selective set he will hear just the type of world’s news that interests him at the moment.”

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22805/page/n11...

“Birth-control methods will be vastly improved. The discovery of a simple drug which would render persons sterile for a few hours would alter half our civilized life and confer a vast fortune upon the inventor. X-rays will render a man sterile; the period may eventually be controlled or corrected by some other form of electrical emanation.”

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22805/page/n14...

“Squadrons of wireless-controlled aeroplanes, or aerial torpedoes, will manoeuvre accurately under the signalled instructions from the base, taking photographs, releasing bombs and disease at will.”

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22805/page/n16...

“To-day a young man is ruled by sex; the blending of male and female, (few one hundred per cent. men and women are to be found), will maintain advancement and lead us to a period where thought is not broken by the smell of a beefsteak, a scented woman, or an expensive garter.”

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22805/page/n11...

> “Science may place at the disposal of future men forces so great that an entire army or city could be annihilated in a second, and it is little exaggeration to state that if the gifts of science were grossly misused man might entirely disappear from the world.”

For context, in 1913 H.G Wells wrote a novel "The World Set Free" that was essentially about atomic bombs. There was already quite a lot of speculation about the potential of harnessing radioactive elements to make bombs by the 20s.

Also, Szilard specifically credits The World Set Free for motivating his own insights into chain reactions and the Manhattan Project...

the greatest Futurist of our time was Alfred Toffler cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler

His books, Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave (1980), and Powershift (1990) represent peak prediction literature based on a philosophy that since 1950 we've entered the Third Wave (first wave being neolithic => agriculture, second being agriculture => industrial, third wave being industrial => post-industrial)

If you read this article and got interested in this kind of thing, check out Toffler. Nearly everything he predicted has come true (minus us mostly living in underwater dwellings, which in his defense, hasn't come true YET).

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