In December 1900, an American civil engineer published an article in the Ladies' Home Journal predicting twenty-eight specific things that would happen in the year 2000. He had been collecting predictions from American scientists for years. The article ran on page eight. About half of the predictions came true. The writer died three years later. He never saw any of them happen.

His name was John Elfreth Watkins Junior. He was forty-eight in 1900. He had been a civil engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad until a freight-car accident broke his leg and ended his railroad career. He took a desk job at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where he became the curator of mechanical technology, and for the last twelve years of his working life he wrote popular-science articles on a freelance basis. The article that made him posthumously famous was titled "What May Happen In The Next Hundred Years." It was published in the December 1900 issue of the Ladies' Home Journal.

Watkins had spent five years interviewing the leading American scientists, engineers, and inventors of his day at the Smithsonian. He wrote up their consensus predictions in plain newspaper prose. Among them: photographs of any event in the world would be telegraphed in colour and printed in the morning newspaper. Hot and cold air would be turned on at the wall of every home like water. Ready-cooked meals would be bought at the local store and warmed at home. Express trains would run two hundred miles an hour. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits would span the entire globe, so that a man in New York could speak to his wife in Peking. Aerial photographs of every house in the world would be available to all. The horse would disappear from common transport. He also predicted strawberries the size of apples. He also predicted that the letters C, X, and Q would be dropped from the alphabet because their sounds were duplicated.

Transatlantic telephone calls: 1927. Air conditioning at the wall: Willis Carrier, 1902. Ready meals at the grocery store: Swanson, 1953. Two-hundred-mile-an-hour express trains: Tokyo Shinkansen, 1964. Aerial photographs of every house in the world available to all: Google Earth, 2005. Colour photographs in the morning newspaper: USA Today, 1982. Wireless telephony between New York and Peking: every smartphone in the world. The article ran in the Ladies' Home Journal of December 1900, page eight. John Elfreth Watkins Junior died in 1903. He saw none of them happen. The strawberries are still the size of strawberries.

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