THE PROPHETS OF DOOM.. Look back to the future
MOBILE PHONES
Inventor Nikola Tesla foresaw the development of our handheld devices in 1909, saying: “It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world so simply that any individual can own and operate his own apparatus.”
COLD WAR
In 1840, long before either country became a superpower, French traveller Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw rivalry between Russia and the United States, saying each nation would, “hold the destinies of half the world in its hands one day.”
TELEVISION
In an article penned in 1900, civil engineer John Watkins said: “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.”
ORGAN TRANSPLANTS
In the 1660s, when medical science hadn’t progressed much beyond leeches, Irish-born boffin Robert Boyle declared transplantations would one day cure disease.
MOVIE STREAMING
Back in 1987, in the age of videotape, film critic Roger Ebert envisaged today’s kind of streaming services.
He said: “We will have high-definition, wide-screen television sets and a pushbutton dialling system to order the movie you want at the time you want it.”
WORLD WAR ONE
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck said in
1888: “One day the great European war will come out of
AS we count down to midnight, you’ll hear plenty of forecasts about what 2024 could hold. Predicting the future is a tricky business, but it turns out that some figures from the past have made eerily accurate prophecies.
Here, from wars to gadgets, JAMES looks back at folk whose crystal ball gazing will give you the shivers…
some damned foolish thing in the Balkans”. World War One began after Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in the Balkans in 1914.
WORLD WAR TWO
French general Ferdinand Foch, Allied Commander in World War One, wasn’t a fan of the Treaty of Versailles with defeated Germany. In 1919, he said: “This is not a peace. It’s an armistice for 20 years.” World War Two began in 1939.
THE BLITZ
Future wartime PM Winston Churchill foretold at age 16: “London will be attacked and I shall be... in command of the defences of London and I shall save London and England from disaster.”
JFK’S DEATH
Psychic Jeane Dixon predicted that US President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in office – seven years before he was killed in Dallas, in 1963.
THE INTERNET
In 1904, American author Mark Twain predicted that a “telelectroscope” would one day make “the daily doings of the globe… visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues”.
GLOBAL WARMING
Scots inventor Alexander Graham Bell warned in 1917 that burning too many fossil fuels would cause a “greenhouse effect”, potentially turning planet Earth into “a sort of hot-house”.
GREAT FIRE OF LONDON
Back in the 16th Century, the French astrologer Nostradamus predicted that “The blood of the just will be lacking in London, burnt up in the fire of ’66”.
The Great Fire of London would devastate the city in the year 1666.