Scholars Mind

Yesterday's Tomorrows

Read about some of the futuristic technologies predicted in the past, then watch this video that shows how those predictions evolved across the 20th century. Some of them seem fantastical—an Olympics on the moon in the year 2020?—but others may already be within our reach, or just slightly beyond (where they may or may not get stuck). With your team, consider: what can we learn about the past from where people thought we were going? Are any of the things that people predicted about the 21st century things you might now predict for the 22nd?

Key concepts

Golden-Age Optimism
The early-twentieth-century faith that technology would go on making life cleaner, faster and grander without anybody having to choose. It is the mood behind the robot butler and the atomic kitchen, and it explains why old misses nearly all overshoot in the same hopeful direction rather than scattering.

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Every work — at a glance

  • Retrofuturism (genre)

    Studying how earlier eras pictured the future; the term traces to a 1960s book by T. R. Hinchliffe.

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What to know

  1. 01
    What old predictions actually teach is their own era, which is why a wrong one is still evidence. The 1950s pictured atomic leisure because that decade believed cheap power would buy free time; the 1970s went dark after Vietnam and the oil crisis. Read them as primary sources and the reliable finding is not what is coming but what each generation was frightened of and hungry for.

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Across subjects

Some predictions were sales pitches. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, General Motors' Futurama carried millions of visitors over a model of 1960 — highways,

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

Are grand visions of tomorrow engines or distractions? They pull money and talent toward hard problems, and some of them get built. They also flatter whoever profits from them, and they crowd out the humbler change that actually arrives. Grade the 1950s, then ask what would survive of your own list in 2120.

Practice — a sample

SOCSomeone who believes a 1950s vision of atomic leisure is evidence about the 1950s is treating it as —

  • A A primary source
  • B A technical forecast
  • C A hoax
  • D A genre parody
  • E An engineering proposal

Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.

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