Archibald Montgomery Low em 1920
In 1925, Professor Archibald Montgomery Low predicted gender-neutral home speakers and clothing. The “relentlessly imaginative” scientist’s predictions for the future mostly come true—but the herbal streetlight failed.
When, a century ago, the scientist and inventor Archibald Montgomery Low predicted “a day in the life of a man from the future”, his prophecies were sometimes considered “ruthlessly imaginative“.
According to the 1925 London Daily News, Low’s predictions included “horrors” such as being woken up by a radio alarm clockcommunications “through a wireless device personal radio“, and have breakfast “with loudspeaker news“.
Low also divined “glimpses of televised events” that we would “make shopping via stairs and mobile sidewalks“, says .
One hundred years after the publication of Low’s book, aptly titled “The Future,” some of your predictions were correct. Others, including his prophecy that everyone would wear one-piece suits and hats in synthetic felt, no.
Researchers at the online genealogy service extracted accounts of Low’s predictions from their extensive digital archive of publicly available historical newspapers and included them in one by people from a century ago.
Low, born in 1888, was a engineer, research physicist, inventor and author. Pioneer in many fields, invented the first motorized droneand worked on television development.
It was known as the “father of radio guidance systems” for his work on planes, torpedo boats and guided rockets and was reportedly the target of at least two unsuccessful assassination attempts by the Germans.
In 1925, he predicted how household speakers and “a television machine” they would replace “the illustrated newspaper” – or newspapers – for on-demand information and entertainment. Guessed access to global broadcasting with the push of a button, and the use of secret chambers and listening devices to catch criminals.
Low also envisioned the use of movable floors and ladders, essentially the escalators and moving walkways today, as well as “automatic phones” with the advantage of always getting the right number, as opposed to the rotary dial telephones of the 1920s.
Some bizarre imaginations of Montgomery Low included new forms of light up the streets with herbselectrically charged water jets to replace cavalry and mind-to-mind electrical communication.
But some of Low’s predictions turned out to be tremendously accurate, such as women dressed in pants become the norm and sex determination before birth.
The big one investment in wind and solar energy of recent years seems to fulfill another prediction: that “the wind and tide must also be taken advantage of for the service of man.”
Furthermore, “life will become much easier with use of machines what they will do all the hard and unpleasant work“, the professor rightly predicted with relentless imagination.
The common man, according to a newspaper report, “will be called punctually by a alarm clock radio programmed to pick up the specific signal at the time you want to get up,” Low guessed.
Before automatic alarms appear, people were awake for work for a morning “knocker upper”a person who went door to door knocking on window panes with a long wooden stick, who only disappeared in Britain in the 1940s and 50s.
However, Low’s prediction that the alarm clock would be set to wake us up “probably around nine thirty” was, unfortunately, too optimistic.
Another prophecy, according to which every morning people would enjoy “some moments of light radio treatment or massage to stay fit and alert for the day’s activities”, seems to be in line with modern health and wellness trends.
“It is amazing that, a century ago, a visionary scientist was able to predict how emerging technologies — at the time still in their embryonic phase — could change the world by 2025,” he says Just Baldwinresearch specialist at Findmypast, which aggregates more than 87 million pages of digitized historical newspapers.
“It makes us stop and think about how the advances we see around us today will be experienced by our own descendants“, nota Baldwin.
Low, who died aged 68, continued to make predictions throughout his lifesometimes met with skepticism. “A doctor from Munich has just prophesied thatwomen who cut their hairover time, they will grow a beard. She and Professor Low should meet”, wrote the Daily Express in 1929.
