One of our favorite things to daydream about is what the future will look like. We’re huge fans of sci-fi, and it’s a personal hobby of ours to try and try to make personal predictions not just for the upcoming year, but what the next decade and even century might offer. This love of futurology is nothing new—people have been trying to foresee the distant past for ages.
Paul Fairie, a researcher at the University of Calgary, put together a viral thread about the predictions made by people in 1923 about life in 2023. Some of these are wild and come with a very definite retrofuturistic, utopian twist! Scroll down to check out how folks living a century ago imagined our present, upvote the newspaper clippings that caught your eye the most, and take a peek at how the internet reacted to Paul’s post.
What do you think 2023 will bring, dear Pandas? What do you imagine 2123 might look like? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Image credits: paulisci
#1
By 2023 there'll be no mail between New York and San Francisco. Pittsburgh and London concerns will record, on talking films, orders from merchants in Peking, and 1,000-mile-an-hour freighters will make deliveries of goods before sunset. Watch-size radio telephones will keep everybody in communication with the ends of the earth.
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#2
No More Hard Work by 2023!
DR. CHARLES P. STEIN- METZ, the electrical expert, believes that the time is coming when there will be no long drudgery and that people will toil not more than four hours a day, owing to the work of electricity. He visualizes an amazing transformation in life in 2023. Every city will be a "spotless town." That is to be the work of electricity, also.
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#3
Cancer, tuberculosis, infantile paralysis, locomotor ataxia, and leprosy will be eradicated.
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#4
Fewer Doctors and Present Diseases Unknown; All People Beautiful
Beauty contests will be unnecessary as there will be so many beautiful people that it wil be almost impossible to select winners. The same will apply to baby contests.
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#5
The population of the United States in the year 2023, probably 300.000,000, will imply an immense progress in the drainage of our low lands, in the irrigation of arid lands.
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#6
In reading a forecast of 2023 when many varieties of aircraft are flying thru the heavens, we do not begin the day by reading the world's news, but by listening to it for the newspaper has gone out of business more than half a century before.
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#7
A new Polar airline is opened making flights across the north pole from Chicago to Hamburg possible in 18 hours.
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#8
A scientist says a century from now the average length of human life will be 300 years. Quite a change. We of today have been living that long about once a month.
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#9
WS SHOULD WORRY.
Good night! It is now predicted that by the year 2023 - only a mere little stretch of a century ahead - women will probably be shaving their heads! And the men will be wearing curls. Also the maidens may pronounce it the height of style in personal primping to blacken their teeth. Won't we be pretty? - Savannah News.
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#10
CURLS FOR MEN BY 2023 PREDICTS ANTHROPOLOGIST
Bases His Statement on Trend of Masculine and Feminine Styles.
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#11
The private kitchen will disappear. Tomorrow's food will be seasoned and prepared by chemical formulas, which will preserve the freshness of fruits and meats, rid them of indigestible qualities, and send them to the table ready to use. Instead of sauces that merely cozen the palate, we shall have delectable blends of concentrated vitamines, calories, ferments, and tissue tonics.
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#12
"Kidney cosies" will be worn to protect the kidneys on chilly days, just the same as a teapot in the north is kept warm by a "tea cosy."
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#13
THE WAR OF A.D. 2023.
Professor Forecasts Wireless Wonders.
|How we shall fight in A.D. 2023" is the subject of a contribution by Professor A. M. Low to the September "Nineteenth Century and After." The professor dwells on latest scientific war terrors, and refers to an invention of his own-jets of water highly charged with electricity- which will render cavalry obsolete.
"The war of 2023," he proceeds, "will naturally be a wireless war, for there is no end to the possibilities of this wonderful force."
"Wireless telephony, sight, heat, power and writing may all play important parts.
Professor Low states that at the present time he can, by an expenditure of about three horse-power destroy a wire at a distance of more than a yard without any connection at all.
Professor Low concludes that it is quite possible that when civilisation has advanced another century, mental telepathy will exist in embryo, and will form a very useful method of communication.
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#14
By 2023 the average life of man could be increased to 100 years. In individual cases it could be increased to 150, perhaps 200 years.
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#15
Canada may well have 100,000,000 people. She is powerful now, with her fine equipment for transport, of commerce and trade, equipment sufficient to serve twice the number of people she has today, and with 100,000,000 population, who can set bounds to the power of Canada 100 years from now.
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#16
Utensils and dwellings will be manufactured largely of pulps and cements so as to utilize vegetation and stone in every stage of decay, ordinary waste or unfitness.
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#17
Minneapolis Journal: It is an attractive prophecy that Glenn Curtiss, the airplane authority, gives of airflight. He predicts that by the year 2023 gasoline as a motive power will have been replaced by radio, and that the skies will be filled with myriad craft sailing over well-defined routes.
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Image credits: paulisci
