New Year's is typically the time when computer columnists and other self-proclaimed prophets make their predictions for the future. I refuse to fall into that crystal ball trap.
It's easy to say that next year we'll see more powerful computers with more memory, lower prices and all that jazz. You can't miss. But when you start trying to predict what life is going to be like in the 1990s and beyond, well, that's where you're sure to fall on your face.
Nostradamus and other seers occasionally did get one right, but few projections of the future have come CLOSE to what the future actually turned out to be. After reading "Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future" (Summit Books, 1984), it becomes obvious that more often, predictions of the future are usually absurd fantasies that are laughably off the mark.
At the General Motors "Futurama" pavillion of the 1939 World's Fair, a world was depicted in which trees would grow under individual glass domes and traffic would move on three-lane highways at 50, 75 and 100 miles per hour. "Unbelievable? Remember, this is the world of 1960!" visitors were informed.
In the Sixties, respected futurist Buckminster Fuller imagined a solution to New York's poverty problem--have all the poor people of Harlem live in 15 towers, each 100 stories high.
Fuller designed a house of the future -- "Dymaxion" -- with inflated rubber floors and automatic climate control that made sheets, blankets and beds unnecessary. His plan was to have these houses carried to their sites by zeppelin.
The blimp, according to Fuller's design, would first drop a bomb to clear out an area, then drop the Dymaxion house right into the crater that was formed in the ground.
In 1915, Ladies Home Journal ran an article by General Electric chief engineer Charles Steinmetz in which he proclaimed that electricity in the future would be "too cheap to meter."
Later on, it was atomic energy that was supposed to be mankind's savior. The pulp magazine Amazing Stories claimed in 1946 that atomic energy would create so much leisure time that people would one day spend most of their day traveling the countryside in "pleasure bubbles."
At Ford, designers came up with the "Nucleon" in 1958. This futuristic car had a built-in nuclear reactor, with the atomic core in the trunk. The next year Ford produced sketches of "Levacar Mach 1," a car that skimmed a few inches above the ground, much like an air hockey puck.
Popular Mechanics asked Winston Churchill to give his views of the future in 1932, and he predicted that by 1982 we would not only have personal robots, but that they would be grown under glass.
Twenty years later, Popular Mechanics became enamored with plastics and predicted the women of tomorrow would use meltable dishes and take their old nylons to chemical factories to be converted into candy.
"The housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a garden hose," the article also explained.
King C. Gillette, a turn-of-the- century visionary, predicted that one day most of the North American population would live in 40,000 skyscrapers near Niagra Falls. (Fortunately for Gillette, he had this little razor blade company to fall back on in case his predictions didn't pan out.)
When television was in its infancy, optimistic futurists predicted that doctors would use this electronic marvel to diagnose illnesses and civilians would help the military spot enemy planes. I suppose a more realistic future of Geraldo Rivera and Morton Downey Jr. would have been just too improbable to foresee.
When experts have attempted to paint a picture of the future in the past, they rarely predicted microwave ovens, compact disks or desk top computers. Instead, they came up with a technological utopia of meals in a pill, babies popping out of automats, mechanical butlers, scent machines, cities floating in the sky, robot vacuum cleaners and "airphibious" cars that turn into planes.
As forward-thinking people, we have a powerful desire to peer into tomorrow. Maybe some of these visions of the future will eventually come true. But any time you boldly go where no man has gone before, you're just ASKING for trouble.
