Octave Uzanne predicted that fashion would reflect the modern woman’s new interest in mobility and practicality.

The 1900s seem to have been a good decade for predicting. We’ve already reported on two Post authors, Otis Mason and John Elfreth Watkins, who had better-than-average forecasting skills. This week, we introduce another: Octave Uzanne, who showed remarkable foresight in his 1901 Post article “What Women Will Wear in the Twentieth Century.”

In this fashion forecast, Uzanne anticipated the fundamental change in women’s wardrobes that would reflect a changing status. When the young girls of 1901 reached adulthood, he said, they would live quite differently from their mothers. In general, they would be less frivolous. Unlike their mothers, they would be less willing to spend long hours dressing themselves in ornate, impractical clothing: “hours which might be filled with work or pleasure more interesting and no doubt more healthful.”

Even though women wouldn’t be able to vote for another 19 years, Uzanne could see women already taking a more active role in their world.

One artist's idea of how fashions, and an automobile, would look in the future.

And fashion would reflect the modern woman’s new interest in mobility and practicality, and give her a sense “of her force, of her rights, of the less subordinate part which might fall to her in the future.”

Her wardrobe would be built around an active life. Unlike the stay-at-home women of the 1900s, the future woman would be a “traveler and student, a lover of sport, of bicycling, and of motor-driving, in mind more independent than ever.” It would be hard to see in the modern woman the sickly and capricious child she had been in previous generations.

Men, he predicted, would first judge her new, comfortable clothing to be immodest, but they eventually would have to accept it because women were through with the floor-length skirt, the veil, and the corset. “No more tight-laced busts and swelling necks; no more whalebone compression and misshapen chests—instead, free bodies.” In making these predictions, he was not simply stating the obvious. Corsets remained in general use for the next two decades, and girdles until the 1960s.

Dressed for lounging on the moon in 1964 Post article "Designs On Your Future."

To appreciate Uzanne’s predictive skills, you need to move forward 63 years, when decorator Evelyn Jablow tried her hand at forecasting in “Designs On Your Future.” Having just visited the Milan Triennale exhibit of 1964, she gave her predictions of women’s fashions in the 21st century.

Future women, as she imagined then, would wear just one outfit: a one-size-fits-all top made of stretch material and tights. The entire wardrobe, just “three or four pieces of clothing,” would fit into a cylinder the size of a golf bag. Also, women would wear only boots and slippers, and no earrings or bracelets.

Evelyn Jablow wasn't the only one predicting one-piece moon suits. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera showcased similar fashion predictions in The Jetsons.

As for men, they would “abandon tie, shirt, and trousers” to wear a “one-piece stretch moon suit” when traveling (presumably through outer space) and, at home, “long tights and a short toga, reminiscent of the free-swinging styles of the Roman charioteer.”

It must have seemed reasonable in 1964, because William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had pretty much the same idea of fashion in 1962 when they created The Jetsons.

Predicting How Women of the Future Would, and Would Not, Dress The Saturday Evening Post

In 1900, Otis T. Mason predicted that we would no longer need stairs because of the introduction of a pair of small elevators, which, being perfectly automatic, would require no attendant.

Now that the end of the world has come and gone—again—we really must get serious about planning.

It would help if we could just get a good idea of what will happen in the future. Unfortunately there seems to be a shortage of dependable predicting these days.

Some will argue that forecasting in the 21st century is particularly difficult because of the rapid rate of change. American politics, technology, and society have all evolved so much in recent years, it’s nearly impossible to see what will happen next. But, as this 1900 article shows, it’s possible to make some fairly reliable predictions even in the middle of disruptive times.

Americans at the turn of the century had seen change on a scale we might appreciate today. The U.S. was just starting to realize the global power of its wealth. Progressive politics was changing government and society. And technology was introducing such epoch-defining products as the telephone, the automobile, the phonograph, and the motion picture.

Yet even in this unprecedented age, Otis Tufton Mason managed to accurately predict home life in the future. A curator at the Smithsonian Institution in 1900 (like John Elfreth Watkins, another uncanny predictor) Mason’s “The Dwelling House of the Twentieth Century” described some of the features of the American home in 1950.

• Central power: Electrical energy “comes in a single current through a heavy wire from a distributing station, and on the premises is split up as required for heating, for lighting, for cooking, etc.” A network of copper wires runs through the home, hidden behind moldings and decoration, to carry power for lights, heaters, and appliance throughout the house.

• Central heating: Instead of shoveling coal into a furnace, homeowners would only have to “set the automatic governor of the heating apparatus at seventy-two degrees, let us say, and the temperature of the whole establishment is maintained at that point for months.”

• Central air conditioning: Cooling will be just as common as heating. It, too, would be “perfectly automatic” so that a single control would keep the temperature always at the same point.

• Modern lighting: Rooms would no longer be illumined by a single, bare gas jet in the middle of the ceiling, leaving one part of a room bright and the rest in relative darkness. Instead, electric bulbs would provide shaded and indirect light for “a warm and cheerful glow” throughout a room.

• Better food packaging: Women would buy groceries in “insect-proof packages” and store perishable food items in a electronically cooled storage compartment.” (This was still the age of iceboxes; the modern refrigerator wasn’t even developed for another 13 years.)

• The energy-efficient kitchen: No more smoke, coal, ashes, or fire that needed constant tending and feeding. “No time is lost in kindling fires. … When a meal is to be prepared, the current is turned on by a twist of a button, and immediately the electric range is ready for service.” And many kitchen chores, like mixing and beating, would be performed by electric appliances.

• Modern furniture: The massive, Victorian-era furniture would be long gone. In its place, would be tables, chairs, and dressers made of the lightest material possible so they can be easily moved and will take up far less space. (They will also decorate their homes with “photographs in natural colors.”)

• Cleaner roads: Automobiles—vastly superior and safer—would replace horses, eliminating the problem of manure, which bred flies and spread disease.

• Environmental concerns: Homeowners would consider the air and water around their home as part of their property, and would regard other people’s smoke or pollution “as an infringement and a cause of action for trespass.”

Mason was certainly not infallible. He predicted homes would be cooled by “liquid air” instead of refrigeration. Homes would not include cellars because occupants no longer needed storage space for coal or firewood. Most Americans would still rely on domestic servants and use elevators instead of stairs.

Still, more than 60 percent of his predictions proved correct—an average any modern forecaster would be proud of.

How the 1950 Home Looked in 1900 The Saturday Evening Post

In its youth, television was a chunky piece of furniture with a tiny, round screen showing fuzzy images of low-budget programs. Despite its shortcomings, it became popular. Between 1950 and 1963, the number of American household with a television jumped from 9% to 92%.

As the audience got larger, the technology got better. Television sets became more reliable through the ‘60s. The reception improved. The picture improved. The major networks started broadcasting programs in color.

Even greater improvements were coming according to Sanford Brown, who wrote  “Tomorrow’s Many-Splendored Tune-In” for the Post in 1967. Surprisingly, just about every prediction he made in the article became reality. For example:

All sets in the not-distant future will be color instruments, with black-and-white having long before gone the way of the windup phonograph.

Integrated circuits will make sets smaller, simpler, more reliable and less expensive, and may forever loosen the TV repairman’s grip on the U.S. economy.

(“Grandpa, what’s a ‘TV repairman’?”)

Smaller sets do not, of course, mean smaller screens. TV engineers expect screens to get much bigger … the screen of the future [will use] electro-luminescent panels embedded in the screen.

In fact, today’s flat screen TVs are able to create images without an enormous cathode ray tube by embedding small cells of ionized gases in the screen.

Three-dimensional TV is even farther away, if it is coming at all. There is some doubt that the public would be eager to pay for it, in view of the fairly tepid reception given to 3-D movies.

An even more important device will be the videograph, or whatever name is eventually coined for recordings that register pictures as well as sound. The price is still too high for the average consumer—about $400 for a player … and $20-$100 for each program cartridge, depending on length and content—but a vast home market would be in sight as soon as [the developers] brings the cost down.

But the technology with the greatest potential, according to Brown, was cable television, which was still in its infancy (only 2% of households had cable service that year.) With a cable connection to a national network, he said, “the passive TV viewer will be able to send back signals along the line.”

As he predicted, the future was highly interactive. It wasn’t cable television that gave Americans their electronic connection to the world, however. It was the internet.

Homes could be connected to a central computer for instant figuring of, say, income taxes

High-speed electrostatic printing devices could be attached to TV sets so the viewer need only press a button, then wait a minute before tearing off an electrostatic newspaper to read at breakfast.

Housewives could examine merchandise projected on TV screens and place orders by punching a couple of buttons.

Pollsters could obtain immediate reactions to TV show, or commercials, or even political candidates. Politicians could obtain an accurate consensus from their constituents on important public issues.

He even foresaw the virtual office and the digital workplace:

Using picture phones, instant memorandum printers, big-screen television for conferences, and computer circuits providing information at the touch of a button, a company could operate just as well as if everyone were in the same building. It might even operate better, since employees could live closer to work, in pleasant surroundings, and feel like members of team rather than cogs in a giant corporate machine.

For all the promise of this new technology, though, Brown saw no corresponding rise in the quality of programming. Maybe the picture on the screen was getting clearer and more colorful, but the sitcoms and westerns had barely evolved since the 1950s.

Brown quoted the current FCC chairman—”The future of television is no longer a question of what we can invent. It is a question of what we want.”—and then asked:

What do we want?

It may be that we will turn to TV for ever more exotic escapism and more titillating titillation and let it go at that, leaving its real potentials untapped.

If such is the case, it might be inaccurate to say that it is what we “want,” but it would not be unfair to say it is what we deserve.

Demonstrating the newest hazard that science has introduced to modern living. This night-clubbing husband, having told his wife that he was working late at the office, will have things to regret—including the invention of television—he instant he gets home." from "Be Good! Television's Watching" August 14, 1949.

A Clear Picture of Television’s Future In 1967 The Saturday Evening Post

The “Aught Years” were so discouraging, Americans have lowered their expectations for the coming decade. The future, once considered a territory of the United States, has become a place we enter with wary caution. We’ve come a long way from the early 20^th Century, when the future seemed so inviting, so full of new ideas and opportunities.

That faith in the future is captured in “Around The World In The Twentieth Century” from the December 2, 1899 Post. The author, Arthur P. Greeley, was an expert in new technology, being the Assistant Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office. He saw a future of incredible mobility, in which science would enable Americans to travel swiftly and comfortably across the nation and around the world.

Let us imagine, for the sake of illustration, that it is the year 1950, AD, and that you and I are going on a trip around the world, proposing to accomplish it in twenty-five days— a length of time which, I think, may possibly be sufficient for the purpose at that date.

Of course, no one could circle the globe in 25 days without radically new technology, such as the high-speed electric locomotive he imagined for 1950.

The locomotive resembles… a cannon-shell magnified. In fact, to all intents and purposes it is a projectile, formed to pierce the air as effectively… as possible. Being run by electricity, it has no boiler and no smokestack such as encumbers the old-style “iron horse,” and of course no tender is required for carrying fuel. The engineer and his assistant occupy fairly comfortable quarters inside the body of the engine, and the machinery under their charge is so simple as to require very little attention.

By the mid-century, Greeley enthuses, Americans would travel from New York to San Francisco in just forty hours!

Railways have certainly improved enormously since 1900. See the landscape fly by the car window? We must be going ninety miles an hour at least, and this train, a “limited express,” often “does” one hundred miles an hour for considerable distance.

We left the Eastern metropolis at exactly ten o’clock this morning, Wednesday September 7, and we shall arrive at the Golden Gate at 2 AM on Friday. The distance has been made in thirty-three hours by a special train carrying the President of the United States, but we are ordinary folk, and must be content with an every-day rate of travel.

In his travelogue of the future, Mr. Greeley stops to wander through the “brilliantly lighted streets” of Chicago. “What a wonderful town it is, to be sure! I understand that this year’s census is likely to credit it with a population of nearly six millions.” He is so entranced that he misses his train, but catches up with it by taking a liquid-air taxicab to the next station in Iowa.

The man in charge of the vehicle demands an extortionate price for his services, but we are not in a position to haggle, and so agree to pay him what he asks.

Greeley races across Illinois along a “boulevard one hundred feet in width and lined on both sides with tall poplar trees… brightly illuminated with electric lights. So smoothly does the carriage glide over it on rubber-tired wheels that we seem almost to be flying, and the pace being steadily accelerated, we soon begin to realize that we are actually traveling at a rate exceeding one hundred miles an hour.”

In his vision of 1950, travelers speed across the Pacific on swift ocean liners, race through China, Russia, and Europe by rail, and eventually reach the English Channel, which is now crossed by tunnel!

What an odd sensation it gives one to think that one is actually traveling under so great a body of water! I understand that some old-fashioned people even at this day are afraid to venture through the tunnel for fear lest the water of the sea will break through and drown them. It is certainly the greatest engineering work ever accomplished, this tunnel beneath the English Channel, and I confess that we have nothing in America to approach it.

The Calais-Dover tunnel is one of the few things Greeley got right. Public rail and automotive travel never reached 100 mph. The population of Chicago seems to have peaked at 3 million, not Greeley’s 6.  But on one point, he was particularly wrong.

Fifty years ago it was popularly imagined that transportation problems sooner or later would be wholly altered by the invention of dirigible aerial machines, and yet to-day, in 1950, the puzzle of human flight is apparently no nearer to a practical solution than it was then. We have produced flying toys of considerable size and of various patterns, but the dream of the airship to carry men through the atmosphere as vessels sail over the water — an aerostat navigable at will and safe — bears no promise of realization.

Working at the Patent Office, Greeley must have seen hundreds of patent applications for experimental aircraft. They would have been crude, light-framed, underpowered machines, but he should have recognized where things were heading.

We can forgive his “liquid-air automobile.” It’s a minor point. The future can be so unreliable. But he broke the one rule a prophet must always observe:  never say something won’t happen. Never rule out a possibility, no matter how improbable. Humans just might learn how to fly. And the American economy just might turn around in 2011.

The One Rule For Making Predictions The Saturday Evening Post