The Ladies Home Journal Predicts the Future
The Ladies Home Journal predicts the future, in 1900. Our "now" was their nearly unimaginable future. Their vision of our present tells us more about them then it does about us, I'm afraid.
Some of the predictions are fairly prescient:
Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today.
Others missed the mark by a mile:
There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.
At the time, adding new states was a fairly common occurence. Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii hadn't yet become states in 1900. So, of course, they thought it reasonable that eventually most of Latin and South America would decide to join the Union.
Check it out. Not only was it fun reading, but it's a warning against getting too smug about our own understanding of the future.