5 June 2013

Birthday
Mark Wahlberg b. 1971 

Wahlberg's career has only a few genre films in it, including Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening and you could kinda sorta say Seth McFarlane's Ted.

It would be hard to choose a trio of directors who have done a better job of getting on my nerves.

But it's not their birthday, it's Mr. Wahlberg's, and the blog wishes him many happy returns.  

Prediction: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.

Predictor: John Elfreth Watkins in The Ladies' Home Journal, published in 1900

Reality: Futurists were keen on pneumatic tubes. I can understand it. They made a cool noise and felt like watching a magic trick. I remember being in an office when I was a kid that had pneumatic tubes. They were big at drive-through banks back in the 1970s before automated tellers took over.

Watkins can be forgiven for thinking this was the wave of the future because both New York and Philadelphia had installed large scale pneumatic tube systems in the 1890s. According to the linked article, the cost was considered prohibitive by 1918 and the cities replaced the systems with auto delivery only. Watkins does get partial credit for assuming the automobile would make horse carts obsolete. Autos weren't rare in 1900 by any means, but they did have to share the road with horses everywhere and trolleys in most major cities.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Another prediction from H.G. Wells, this time about the future of war and architecture.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!