100 Year Predictions - from 1900

Thanks to the Yorktown Historical Society we have the 100 year forecasts published by the Ladies Home Journal. Many of these predictions dealt with super-sized fruits, but here are several about global communications:

• 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.

• 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 ... will view ... the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient.

• Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world.

The Web Represents Us

Joshua Porter of Bokardo points to comments by Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web This information about Berners-Lee's book is made available online by W3, the World Wide Web Consortium.

“The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. What we believe, endorse, agree with, and depend on is representable and, increasingly, represented on the Web. We all have to ensure that the society we build with the Web is of the sort we intend.”

He goes on to say: Every time I read Tim’s words, I am reinvigorated and am glad to be part of this thing they call the Web.