Do you have to brush your own hair, own an umbrella or keep at least one hand on your steering wheel? Don’t blame these visionary thinkers
“Things can only get better”, D:Ream promised, but they were wrong, and so were most people in history who have tried to predict the future.
It never stopped us from trying, though, and a few visionaries have been pretty good at it. There was Leonardo da Vinci, of course, with his helicopters and fridges, and Joseph Glanvill, who in 1661 suggested moon voyages and communication using “magnetic waves” might be a thing. Civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins, writing in 1900, predicted mobile phones, ready meals and global digital media (“Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later”). Visionary US cartoonist Arthur Radebaugh’s late 1950s and early 1960s Closer Than We Think series conjured wrist-worn TVs, robot-run warehouses and bloodless surgery.
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