Birthday
Allison Hayes b. 1930 died 27 Feb. 1977
My thanks to reader gbaji for pointing out this name I missed. Miss Hayes is best known as the star of the original 1957 version of Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, an awful film with one of the most famous and iconic posters of all time.
In the year 2000!
Prediction #1: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.
Prediction #2: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move.
Predictor: John Elfreth Watkins, writing in a 1900 issue of The Ladies' Home Journal
Reality: Damn, this guy is good. He's writing from a time before Edison has made The Great Train Robbery but slightly after Marconi's first successful experiments. All he guesses correctly are TV, transmission of color photos, (nearly) instantaneous worldwide news.
Of course, we denizens of Watkins' wonderful predicted future turned this stuff into the cable news industry. That's on us, not him.
Watkins made only about two dozen predictions. He gets things wrong, but when he is accurate, it's almost eerie. I'm going to miss him when I write his last one. I'll probably bring him back next year maybe like once a month.
Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Thursday belongs to Arthur C. Clarke, who predicts in the 1960s some strange alliances in the year 2001.
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
I'm telling you, he got his hands on an iPhone that fell through a wormhole.
ReplyDeleteThat would also explain his relative scarcity of predictions: he only had use of the thing until the contract ran out.
I sure hope he didn't Google himself. He dies in 1903, so he made it to 50 or 51. I can't find out if it was some accident or one of the many diseases that killed off people long before they were elderly.
ReplyDeleteOf all the things I've learned since starting this project, knowing about John Elfreth Watkins is the funnest of all the fun facts to know and tell.
I'm heartbroken that this person didn't make your birthday roll.
ReplyDeleteThank you, gbaji, I will rectify this error immediately. I have been tracking down predictions and working on the math blog so much I have been remiss with the birthdays.
ReplyDelete