Welcome to the Paleofuture blog, where we explore past visions of the future. From flying cars and jetpacks to utopias and dystopias.
What will fashionable people of the year 2024 be wearing? The January 11, 1924 edition of the Fresno Bee newspaper in California tackled that question with both plenty of humor and it’s a great reminder that so many of our predictions for the future are influenced by the most pressing issues of our age.
The August 24, 1974 issue of Saturday Review World magazine was completely devoted to what the world of 2024 would look like. And given the simple fact that we’re only a couple of weeks away from that futuristic-sounding year, now feels like an appropriate time to see how they did.
When the health care company DocGo announced in 2022 it would be rolling out a new all-electric ambulance for transporting patients, promotional materials billed it as America’s first electric ambulance. And while that assertion wouldn’t necessarily seem immediately suspect to anyone alive today, since our lives have largely been dominated by the internal combustion engine, that would certainly be news to people at the turn of the 20th century. Because the electric ambulance is probably way older than you’d guess.
When the Pentagon started to become more public about its plans for artificial intelligence roughly a decade ago, there was a phrase that always came up: In the loop. It was shorthand for a person being involved in the decision-making process about whether to launch a strike that had the potential to kill people. Having a human being “in the loop” to decide when lethal action would be taken ostensibly allowed the military to retain some of its humanity, without completely surrendering decisions to cold and calculating machines. And while some people still consider AI to be a “future” problem in warfare since we don’t yet have Skynet, advanced computing is already playing an important role on today’s battlefield, for better and for worse.
If you’re an American, there’s a good chance you’re celebrating Thanksgiving today. It’s a holiday built on food, family, and more than a few founding myths about the country. But what will Thanksgiving look like in the future? That was the question posed to Ohio kids for a newspaper article in 1963. And there are quite a few interesting answers.
Back in July of 1969, a small but dedicated group of people at UCLA were working on a computer project that would have an enormous impact on the future. Thanks to money from the Department of Defense, they were working on a new kind of computer network that would eventually become known as the ARPANET, the precursor to our modern internet. And I’ve uncovered an unassuming press release that looks pretty damn interesting in retrospect.
Playboy subscribers who just read it for the articles opened up the October 1970 issue to a grand promise. In a piece titled “The Transport Revolution,” readers were told that exciting new modes of transportation were just over the horizon. And that by 1985, all our cars would be driverless, our long distance train travel would see us zipping across the U.S. at 215 miles per hour, and gigantic hoverboats would become the norm just off America’s coasts.
Physical media is an endangered species, with laserdiscs, DVDs, and even Blu-Rays joining the ranks of once-futuristic technology we don’t see much anymore. But the idea of playing a physical disk to watch a movie is much older than you might guess. In fact, one inventor had an idea for a practical disk-based movie player all the way back in 1923, a full 100 years ago.
Planning for the future is hard, no matter where you live. But there are challenges specific to living in a dysfunctional country that can make it impossible to imagine what your tomorrows will look like. And events of the past week are a stark reminder that Americans face issues that people in other wealthy countries don’t need to worry about.
When Sunday newspaper readers opened the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on October 21, 1923 they were greeted with an enormous two-page spread about the future of war in 2023. The violent battles of 100 years into the future, they were told, would feature precision guided rockets, rapid-fire guns, and drones that would be controlled by men pushing buttons far away from the action. Or, to put it another way, they saw a vision for the future of war that was incredibly accurate.
American football has gone through a number of changes since it was first invented in the 19th century. Players can now use their hands, there are just 11 players for a given team on the field at any one time instead of 25, and the game has gotten much safer. A whopping 19 football players died in 1905, if you can believe it.
I follow a lot of crazy conspiracy theory pages across the internet, just to keep up with the latest and greatest in all the things “they” don’t want you to know about. So it was no surprise when I recently saw an assertion on Reddit that the CIA had mastered remote viewing in the 20th century and was able to see life on the planet Mars a million years ago. Spoiler alert: the CIA did not figure out remote viewing. But several big government agencies took paranormal ideas very seriously in the 1960s. And there were plenty of people who thought telepathy would become a reality in the future.
President Joe Biden made history this week when he briefly visited the picket line of the United Autoworkers Union who are striking against the Big Three automakers in Michigan to get fair pay. But auto workers, just like workers in many other fields, are still concerned about the role of automation in potentially putting people out of work. And those fears were very acute in the early 1960s.
It’s become virtually impossible for people here in the year 2023 to deny that climate change is happening, with most climate deniers now insisting there’s simply nothing that can be done about any of it. But the science is settled. Humans are causing the planet to warm through our actions. And watching a TV episode from 1988 lay out all of the facts is pretty shocking in retrospect.
The late Herman Kahn, an expert at the RAND Corporation who dreamed up what “success” might look like in a nuclear war, is perhaps best remembered today as the guy who inspired some of the craziest ideas in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film Dr. Strangelove. But Kahn was also a futurist in the conservative movement who believed that Americans were on the cusp of rebelling against the liberal elites who were warping the country with their “alternative lifestyles” and advocacy of “limited growth.”
I was looking through some old photos of Disneyland’s House of the Future, an attraction that was at the park from 1957 until 1967, when I came across an image I’d never seen before. To anyone here in the 21st century, it’s just a thermostat. And while this version of climate control was certainly futuristic for the 1950s and ‘60s, there’s one detail that I find very interesting. The wall unit appears to have four setting for different smells.
Those of us here in the early 21st century like to think so many of our technologies are brand new, whether it’s self-driving cars or 3D-printing. But the more you study the history of technology, the more you understand the tech we use today is a process of reinvention and incremental change stretching back centuries. And the latest example of this, which I recently discovered in an old magazine, is a machine that was used for copying statues, invented in 1894.
Did you watch the livestream of the West Point time capsule that was opened on Monday? Everyone was disappointed that it didn’t appear to contain anything except some silt. But it did contain something, according to a new press release from West Point. It was just underneath the silt.
Back in 1924, Professor David Todd at Amherst College made a startling prediction about the future of New York. The island of Manhattan, Todd said, would one day experience a terrible earthquake that could potentially destroy the city. And while the prediction made a splash in the New York Times, one tech magazine from the era even produced illustrations about what the destruction might look like.
Back in the mid-1990s, baseball commissioner Bud Selig spoke with CNN host Larry King about what the future of baseball was going to look like into the 2010s. And while many of the predictions were pretty conservative, there were some interesting ideas raised that have yet to become a reality.
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point discovered a time capsule in the base of a monument during recent renovations. And, believe it or not, the time capsule is believed to be about 169 years old. West Point plans to livestream the time capsule ceremony on Monday, August 28, and you can bet I’ll be tuning in.
Back in the 1950s, computers were the size of entire rooms, videophone were an expensive novelty, and TV was just finally going mainstream. What did the future of home entertainment hold? Plenty, according to an article I found recently in a California newspaper from 1956.
A couple of months ago we looked at the promises people of the 1940s were hearing about the commuter helicopters of the future. Everyone was supposed to get their own personal aircraft after World War II, at least according to companies that were making a number of big promises. But apparently we missed an ad that was featured in magazines of the era. And it was coming from a whiskey company, believe it or not.
We explore a lot of predictions here at Paleofuture that didn’t pan out. So it’s kind of cool to stumble upon a prediction that was extremely accurate, like this 1930s idea for wind-powered greenhouses in the Arctic.
Today, there’s a lot of concern that machines are taking over the jobs of people in offices across the U.S., with the rise of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. But predictions about robots pushing white collar workers out of their jobs have been around for decades. In fact, I recently came across an article from 1954 that warned computers would force many office workers to adopt new skills that machines couldn’t do.
If you came across the photo above, you probably wouldn’t think it was too consequential in the grand scheme of world events. But this photo is indeed historic. That man, sitting in the back of a woody station wagon in 1955, is eating his lunch off a suitcase containing a nuclear weapon. In fact, it was one of the first miniaturized atomic bombs in history. And after a little sleuthing, I helped uncover the real story behind this photo.
Banks have often been some of the first businesses to embrace new technology, whether it was computer networks or mass surveillance. But one idea for banks in the early 1930s was a little out there. One architect proposed that banks be designed with see-through glass so that everything could be seen at all times.
The manufacturing of automobiles in the U.S. ground to a halt during World War II, as America’s industrial might pivoted to aiding the war effort. But that didn’t stop people from dreaming about the kinds of futuristic cars that would become a reality after the war. There was just one small problem: Car enthusiasts were pretty disappointed with the vehicles that rolled off the line immediately after the war.
Do you ever read something so disturbing it keeps you up at night? Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about the enslavement of Indigenous people in California during the 19th century. And while I like to think I’m mostly numb to so many of the horrors that naturally pop up whenever you read American history, I struggled to fall asleep last night after reading about one particular event from 1861.
The late 1950s was filled with predictions that would later be regarded as the Golden Age of Technological Futurism. Whether it was shipping packages via missile or using videophones to conduct business around the world, the people of the late 1950s were inundated with fantastical promises. And one ad campaign from the Hughes Aircraft Company wrapped up all these ideas into a neat little package in 1957.
Paleofuture is written and edited by Matt Novak—100% human-created content without the assistance of artificial intelligence.
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