predictions for the year 2000

The 1900 December issue of The Ladies Home Journal published an article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. listing some predictions for the year 2000 – exactly a hundred years into the future. A few interesting ones are shortlisted below:

• Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains.  Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.
• Prediction #5: Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express.  There will be cigar-shaped electric locomotives hauling long trains of cars. Cars will, like houses, be artificially cooled. Along the railroads there will be no smoke, no cinders, because coal will neither be carried nor burned. There will be no stops for water. Passengers will travel through hot or dusty country regions with windows down.
• Prediction #7: There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.
• Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances.  Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.
• Prediction #18: Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl”.

For a full list of predictions, go to this page. It’s amazing how some predictions become exactly true.

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automatically generate your expenditure bills

Ok. This one is not for real. But this one is definitely for a little fun to do with that extra money you already spent, for which you want receipts to stay out of trouble. So load the page here. Then put the amount you want to spend. It’ll do the rest. As for me I spent some $234 in the restaurant, that I shouldn’t have spent; and later I generated some bills, the snippets of which are shown here.

This tool was in fact, built by Maloney & Porcelli restaurant, probably as a promotion for their online reservation. It says in their homepage,

Now you can eat at Maloney & Porcelli as often as you like and never worry about your expense report raising any eyebrows. Simply type in your bill total below and the expense report generator will do the rest.

So next time you have some spare money that you’ve already spent, just remember the figure you spent and head to this amazing expenditure bills generator.

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the times they are a-changin’

With thanks and praise for Bob Dylan, ladies and gentlemen, The Times They Are A-Changing:

Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics, who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide the chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon for the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside and it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers, throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one, if you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

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