Starting up an Engine[er]: future predictions

No I'm not crazy, but don't let that stop you from reading this post. You will still find it amusing.

Trust me, the rather off the wall title and aforementioned promise of insane content will slowly come into focus as you digest the following written words.

Just recently my attention was redirected from designing a new floor, towards a rather tantalising tweet aimed at me by one of my networking friends in St Albans [nice guy - Nigel]. We had previously spoke at length, he knew I was an Engineer and blogger, and thought that I might enjoy reading an article. In it starred an American Civil Engineer who in 1900, made a name for himself by predicting what the last 100 years might bring to our world. Heavily centred on America, of course. You don't know of him? His name was John Elfreth Watkins (1852-1903).

I apologise to all those who are already familiar with the article, but for those who are not familiar, I wish to quickly summarise the piece which was published in the Ladies' Home Journal.

When I read the digital copy, I counted 28 paragraphed predictions which Watkins made [most paragraphs contained a few bonus ones though - so there are load more]. Some of his predictions are eerily accurate, like;

Americans in the year 2000 will likely be 1-2 inches taller on average than they were in the 1900's. Apparently this has already been shown to be true.
Watkins also predicted that wireless telephones would exist in the future, and would allow a husband in the middle of the Atlantic to converse with his wife 'real-time' in her boudoir in Chicago. I think that he meant his mistress.

This rather insightful Civil Engineer also predicted colour digital photography, along with foreseeing that these images would be transported across the globe in seconds, and be published in the news in the matter of hours. Twitter or Facebook?

In amongst his fabulously accurate predictions were to be found a number of 'curve balls' if you are American, or crackpot ideas.

One such idea was there will be no wild animals left in the world, except for menageries and I suspect zoos.
He also predicted that rats and mice would become extinct,
and that strawberries as large as apples would be eaten by his great great grandchildren on Christmas day. Apparently only one strawberry each would do. So no 5-a-day then? All of your nutritional needs in one giant strawberry. Excellent.

As you can see, from the above - John Watkins was an interesting breed of Civil Engineer.

But I didn't want to talk to you about his predictions or how accurate they were, or even if he was some kind of genius... what I wanted to talk to you about was more to do with the reporting of this article.

When my friend brought the piece by Watkins to my attention, I (a) read the article which I was pointed towards, (b) read the article which it was resourced from, then (c) I read the actual piece which Watkins wrote. It was then that something struck me.

I then searched the internet for more instances where this 1900's article had been critiqued or blogged about. There I found my second bolt of lightening. Hundreds of times, this very same piece had been birthed in some dark bloggy corner of the web, grown into news articles and then it eventually croaked. My findings stretched back to 2007. There may be older examples out there.

It occurred to me that many [not all] of those who found the Watkins piece had indeed found it second or third hand like me. They, like me recognised that some of their network may well enjoy this wee bit of whimsy, and republished it for their pleasure. Nothing wrong with that either.

EXCEPT, it appeared that some of us had simply skimmed the Watkins piece to check its validity and then accepted the second hand news article as accurate. By not paying due attention and spending a little time reading the actual Watkins document, they were loosing some of the vital facts. They were also rushing to publish their blog and news feed before their competition did too... this is plainly obvious.

Links to some of the sites I visited:

Paleofuture / The Sun / i09 Welcome from the future / BBC News / Daniel H Pink / Stupidest.com / London Street Spiritual Church / Salem Chamber of Commerce / Saturday Eveningpost

My favourite one above is the 'stupidest ides of what everyday life would be like in the future'. Very funny.

What happened amongst these news articles and posts, was a minor distortion of the truth. Not particularly on purpose either. Due to the amazing amount of information that we attempt to absorb nowadays, and the speed in which we are able to share it, a little laziness seems to have crept in. No longer do we have the time to check out each and every post, before we retweet or 'like' it.

Well, I do not wish to spend anymore time on that particular realisation [as I do not want to dwell on how very late I was in finding this news piece :-)], apart from to set a few things straight about the Watkins piece.

Firstly, he did not predict these future occurrences with absolute certainty in mind. He merely stated 'What may happen...'. That may be semantics to you, but to me, that's just writing down and publishing the results of an entertaining pub chat, which commonly occurs between colleagues and friends, in many bars in many countries across the world.

Also quite interestingly, even though it appears that John Watkins wrote the piece and took the credit for it, all he did was round up a pomposity of professors and an asylum of industry experts [probably in a pub] and regurgitate their ideas on 'what gives' for the next 100 years. Also, because John didn't think to mention the names of his colleagues in the piece, we are currently stumped to know who they all were. Note - if access to those names is possible, and my armchair research wasn't thorough enough... then many apologies.

You will be forgiven for thinking that some of their ideas are so close to the truth, that they deserve our attention. This is true, very true in fact. One paragraph predicts vegetables will be grown by electricity both night and day was quite cool. Although I have to say that the prediction which states there would be no use for C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet in the future, is Quite wrong and fills me up with a eXCeeding amount of sCeptiCism. Perhaps they were on their fourth pint by then and already lining up the sambuca shots.

In an effort to combine one of my life's little pleasures with this train of thought though, I would like to leave you with this one video clip. It is only 2 minutes long so please watch it, as I think that it eloquently demonstrates the process of predicting the future, by reverse engineering a daft question. Therefore if you come up with a crazy thought or two of what the future may hold for us, you can by reasoning and generally making stuff up, justify your thoughts. Take it away Dr Sheldon Cooper [Big Bang Theory].

"In a world where rhinos are domesticated pets, who wins the second world war?"