What does it take to look into the future?

Hello World,
At the start of the year the BBC news site reported on the century predictions made by John Elfreth Watkins Jr.,  an American civil engineer.  In 1900 he wrote an article "What may happen in the next hundred years" published in the Ladies Home Journal speculating about the impact of technology in the year 2000, some of these predictions turned out to be extraordinarily perceptive.

Among the predictions that stand out are descriptions of:
-A wireless telephone service which supports global communications (reflected in today's mobile telephone network)
-The electrical transmission of camera images around the world (today's TV network)
-150mph Train travel (even in 1900 possibly no one in history had travelled at 100mph in any mode of transport)
-Home heating, free of smoke and without the need of a furnace (gas and electric central heating)
-Refrigerated transport of food (a visit to a supermarket reveals foodstuffs from around the world)

There were a number of things he did get very wrong like suggesting that people would walk 10 miles a day and that mosquitoes and flies would be eradicated!  In any long view prediction these misses are to be expected, but even taking these into account his overall perceptiveness is impressive.

What I think is most interesting about Watkins is not what he got right but his way of thinking about future technology.  I think his success is based on an approach characterised by:

1. A sense of what people really want technology to do for them Watkins had an insight into the burdens and chores of everyday life that people would gladly be free of - like storing heating fuel and shovelling it into a fire, or eating only local seasonal foods.
2. The view that markets shape and influence technological development. This is perhaps a consequence of Watkins living in an industrialising democracy with a growing consumer base.
3. A historical sense of the role of technology. As an engineer in a young nation he may have been acutely aware of how technology had shaped its development.  For example the role the printing press played in enabling the revolt in the Revolutionary War (being the social media of the day).  The American Civil War demonstrated the use of the telegraph and photography.  Being perhaps the first media war, the Union Army had to work with the newspapers, and reporters telegraphed their reports to their editors in the cities. And the Union Pacific railway line completed in 1869 linking the Eastern US with the Pacific Coast, less than a hundred years after the declaration of independence.

The predictions that Watkins got right appear to be tempered by these considerations.  His predictions also assume the invention of supporting technologies that enabled these to become reality (for example fibre optics, digital systems and computers).  This reinforces his attitude that what people really want drives and shapes technology.

It is tempting to dismiss the many features of today's world that Watkins completely missed, for example movies,the air age, rocketry, and plastics.  But these perhaps give us a handle on the difficulties he faced looking into the deep future:

• Living in an age of specialisation. The scale of 19th and 20th century science required scientists and engineers to specialise, and the volume of new knowledge made it impossible for anyone to keep completely abreast of progress.
• The limits of imagination.  When Watkins predicted television he possibly did not imagine that a popular use would be to watch pre-recorded acted stories (movies).  This is not to say that he couldn't have conceived what became perhaps the defining creative form of the 20th Century.  Similarly, I have little doubt that in the 22nd century there will be forms of entertainment that will make today's 3D movies and video games seem as quaint as silent movies seem to us.  It's just that I just can't imagine it.