Visions of the Future - Page 4

Right or wrong, mid-century predictions about life ahead in the 21st century are now fascinating—and amusing
By Jack Levitan
visions of the future
Women of the year 2000, according to some back in the mid-century, "will be more than six feet tall, wear a size 11 shoe, have shoulders like a wrestler and muscles like a truck driver." It also meant that she could effortlessly move sofas on her back.

Much retrofuture thinking, though, stuck to how scientific breakthroughs would affect not human nature but human comforts. As 1950 rolled to an end, the Associated Press delved into 'How Experts Think We'll Live in 2000 A.D.'

"Signs point to vertical cities and flying suburbs—little airport communities 100 miles and more from skyscraper clusters rising in the midst of acres of parks and playgrounds," the article said.

"Rigid zoning in small towns will insure yards, gardens, and trees for each house, where window walls will slip down in slots to merge outdoors with indoors in favorable weather. City dwellers will bask on individual balconies high above the treetops of parks surrounding elevator apartment houses. All homes will have temperatures maintained at constant comfortable levels the year-round for human efficiency. Heat will be tapped from the bowels of the earth and refrigeration will cool houses in the same process."

That same year, science editor Waldemar Kaempffert of the New York Times wrote in Popular Mechanics magazine about 'Miracles You'll See in the Next 50 Years,' including homes that could be cleaned by turning "the hose on everything."

  visions of the future
Cover of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932).
  

Everything, you see, would be made of washable plastic. Just make sure there are no Picasso lithos hanging on your walls.

Housing, the workplace, and travel would not be the only things to see major changes in 50 years, the AP wrote in 'How Experts Think...' Women too would change, for the better.

"The woman of the year 2000 will be an outsize Diana, anthropologists and beauty experts predict. She will be more than six feet tall, wear a size 11 shoe, have shoulders like a wrestler and muscles like a truck driver.

  visions of the future
Why walk to the store when you can fly yourself there—courtesy of this take on future solo transportation.
  

"Chances are she will be doing a man's job, and for this reason will dress to fit her role. Her hair will be cropped short, so as not to get in the way. She probably will wear the most functional clothes in the daytime, go frilly only after dark.

"Her proportions will be perfect, though Amazonian, because science will have perfected a balanced ration of vitamins, proteins, and minerals that will produce the maximum bodily efficiency, the minimum of fat.

  visions of the future
Vertical cities were rising in the future of mid-century predictors.
  

"She will go in for all kinds of sports—probably will compete with men athletes in football, baseball, prizefighting, and wrestling. "She'll be in on all the high-level groups of finance, business, and government.

"She may even be president."

Well, maybe in 2024.

 

Photography: courtesy Rico Tee Archive

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