Friday, January 28, 2011

Thomas Edison's Predictions: Spot On

This Edison guy - it turns out that he knew a few things.

As if we needed any proof, the Wizard of Menlo Park had a keen insight into how technology would go on to shape our lives. In an interview with the Miami Metropolis in 1911, Thomas Alva Edison sketched out a future in which:

Electricity supplants steam as the power source for trains
Air travel is a regular feature of our daily lives
Steel becomes cheap and plentiful as a construction material
An e-reader of sorts where "a book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes."

Truth be told, Edison wasn't 100% clairvoyant (who is?) He predicted that mankind would have discovered how to turn iron into gold so that by today we would be able to tool around in golden taxicabs. OK, he blew that one, but still a darned good reading of the tea leaves.

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