History's boldest predictions, aged to perfection.
For over 100 years, baseball experts have taken turns predicting the sport's death and resurrection with equal confidence. The game's still here, the hot dogs still cost $8, and the doomsayers are still swinging and missing.
For seventy years, American politicians have promised that the next big transportation breakthrough would end traffic forever. Spoiler: You're still stuck behind that Honda Civic going 45 in the left lane.
In the groovy 1960s, architectural prophets declared the death of suburban sprawl and the dawn of communal dome living. Spoiler alert: Americans chose McMansions over moon bases.
For seventy years, sociologists, feminists, and conservatives have confidently declared marriage dead on arrival. Yet Americans keep stubbornly saying 'I do' — even if the institution they're saying it to looks nothing like what anyone expected.
In 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry dropped what should have been a smoking gun that would end cigarettes forever. Instead, it became the longest, most expensive game of whack-a-mole in American history.
Meet the culinary prophets who stared at sushi in the 1960s and proclaimed it would never survive American squeamishness. Today, their descendants are probably ordering spicy tuna rolls on DoorDash while reading this article.
In the 1960s and 70s, IBM executives and tech luminaries confidently proclaimed that personal computers were pure fantasy. Their reasoning? Nobody could possibly want a computer in their living room.
The 1980s unleashed a parade of experts who swore Japan would economically conquer America faster than you could say 'Toyota.' Spoiler alert: the Land of the Rising Sun hit a few clouds nobody saw coming.
From jazz to TikTok dances, America's moral guardians have spent over a century predicting that each new musical genre would turn teenagers into criminals. Spoiler alert: the kids turned out fine, but the predictions aged like milk in the desert.
In 1992, the USDA's food pyramid told Americans to gorge on carbs and fear fat like the plague. Thirty years later, after an obesity epidemic that would make the Black Death jealous, they quietly swapped the pyramid for a plate and pretended nothing happened.
In the 1950s, nuclear boosters swore up and down that splitting atoms would make electricity so ridiculously cheap that utilities would just give it away for free. Spoiler alert: your monthly electric bill suggests they may have been slightly off in their calculations.
Since 1964, experts have been warning that robots are about to steal every American job within the next five years. Spoiler alert: we're still waiting for the unemployment apocalypse that's been perpetually scheduled for next Tuesday.
In the 1970s, federal agencies and oil experts confidently predicted America would be bone-dry of petroleum by 1990. They had charts, graphs, and very serious mustaches to prove it. Then horizontal drilling said 'hold my beer.'
When television arrived in American living rooms in the late 1940s, the nation's educators, intellectuals, and civic leaders greeted it as a miracle of democratic enlightenment. Opera for the masses. Literature on demand. A nation uplifted by the glowing rectangle in the corner. This is the story of that optimism, held at arm's length and examined with great tenderness before the Nielsen ratings arrive.
For six decades, the smartest people in American business have been absolutely certain that paper was finished. They were wrong in the 1960s, wrong in the 1970s, catastrophically wrong in the 1980s, and somehow most wrong of all in the 1990s — right before paper consumption hit an all-time high. The memo outlasted everyone who predicted its death.
In 1967, a remarkable collection of futurists, marketers, and social scientists — almost all of them men — sat down to predict what the American woman would want, buy, and care about by the turn of the millennium. They were detailed. They were confident. They were spectacularly, almost impressively wrong. We have the quotes.
Since roughly the time your grandfather was learning to drive, Americans have been promised a flying car within the next few years. The promise has been made by engineers, entrepreneurs, magazine editors, and at least one person who definitely should have known better. We tracked every major instance. The results are not encouraging, but they are extremely funny.
In 1995, some of America's sharpest CEOs, journalists, and academics looked at the World Wide Web and saw absolutely nothing worth worrying about. We found their quotes, dusted them off, and built a scoring system to rank exactly how wrong they were. Spoiler: several of them later ran companies that would have ceased to exist without the thing they mocked.
In 1953, a peculiar inventor and publisher named Hugo Gernsback described, in remarkable detail, a handheld wireless device that could send messages, display information, and connect people across vast distances. America responded by largely ignoring him. This is our formal apology, issued only seven decades late.
Somewhere in a filing cabinet that nobody has opened since 1987, there are think tank reports confidently declaring that the traditional American office would be obsolete by the mid-1980s. They were wrong, of course. Or were they just catastrophically, almost impressively, early? COVID-19 may have just retroactively vindicated a generation of futurists who severely underestimated the gravitational pull of the office parking lot.