History's boldest predictions, aged to perfection.
Throughout history, a parade of confident experts, industry analysts, and very serious journalists have declared certain behaviors categorically un-American. Paying for water. Talking to a cylinder on your kitchen counter. Letting a computer handle your money. Every single time, Americans looked at the expert consensus and said: hold my (expensive bottled) beer.
In 1900, a civil engineer named John Elfreth Watkins Jr. sat down and wrote a list of predictions for what life would look like in the year 2000. Some of them were visionary. Some were completely unhinged. And one of them — one glorious, eerily specific one — should have made the man a household name.
In 1995, astronomer Clifford Stoll published a Newsweek column confidently explaining why the internet would never replace real commerce, real community, or real anything. He was spectacularly wrong. The uncomfortable part? His reasoning was almost coherent.
For eight consecutive decades, engineers, investors, and magazine editors have solemnly promised that flying cars are just twenty years away. Mathematically speaking, that means they were due in 1945. We're still waiting. Chester Wrongwright investigates humanity's most stubborn, most expensive, and most aeronautically challenged broken promise.
In 1967, RAND Corporation analyst Herman Kahn mapped out the technological landscape of the year 2000 with uncanny accuracy — lasers fixing your eyeballs, satellites beaming TV into your living room, shopping from a screen in your kitchen. The one thing he got catastrophically, almost insultingly wrong? He thought all that technology would give Americans more time off. Bless his heart.
Once the undisputed king of social news, Digg managed to fumble its throne so spectacularly that it became a cautionary tale taught in business schools. Here's the full, gloriously messy story of how one website rose to the top of the internet, handed everything to a competitor on a silver platter, and then spent the next decade trying to remember what it was good at.