There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.

The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present — for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare. . . .

There will be no street cars in our large cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. . . . These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. . . . Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express. . . .

Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. . . . Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. . . .

There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. . . .

[There will be] [a]erial war-ships and forts on wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities. . . . These aerial war-ships will necessitate bomb-proof forts, protected by great steel plates over their tops as well as at their sides. . . . Rifles will use silent cartridges. Submarine boats submerged for days will be capable of wiping a whole navy off the face of the deep. . . . Balloons and flying machines will carry telescopes of one-hundred-mile vision with camera attachments, photographing an enemy within that radius. . . .

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. . . .

Insect screens will be unnecessary. Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated. . . .

Peas and beans will be as large as beets are to-day. Sugar cane will produce twice as much sugar as the sugar beet now does. . . . Plants will be made proof against disease microbes just as readily as man is to-day against smallpox. The soil will be kept enriched by plants which take their nutrition from the air and give fertility to the earth. . . . Strawberries as large as apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence. . . . One cantaloupe will supply an entire family. . . .

There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second. . . .

A university education will be free to every man and woman. . . . Medical inspectors regularly visiting the public schools will furnish poor children free eyeglasses, free dentistry and free medical attention of every kind. The very poor will, when necessary, get free rides to and from school and free lunches between sessions. In vacation time poor children will be taken on trips to various parts of the world. Etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools.

Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. . . . By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a “hello girl.”

Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box. . . . In great cities there will be public opera-houses whose singers and musicians are paid from funds endowed by philanthropists and by the government. . . .

Coal will not be used for heating or cooking. It will be scarce, but not entirely exhausted. The earth’s hard coal will last until the year 2050 or 2100; its soft-coal mines until 2200 or 2300. Meanwhile both kinds of coal will have become more and more expensive. Man will have found electricity manufactured by waterpower to be much cheaper. All of our restless waters, fresh and salt, will thus be harnessed to do the work which Niagara is doing today: making electricity for heat, light and fuel.

Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house. . . . Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times.

Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles . . . and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. . . .

In cold weather he [the farmer] will place heat-conducting electric wires under the soil of his garden and thus warm his growing plants. He will also grow large gardens under glass. At night his vegetables will be bathed in powerful electric light, serving, like sunlight, to hasten their growth. . . .

Fast-flying refrigerators on land and sea will bring delicious fruits from the tropics and southern temperate zone within a few days. The farmers of South America, South Africa, Australia and the South Sea Islands, whose seasons are directly opposite to ours, will thus supply us in winter with fresh summer foods, which cannot be grown here. . . .

Few drugs will be swallowed or taken into the stomach unless needed for the direct treatment of that organ itself. Drugs needed by the lungs, for instance, will be applied directly to those organs through the skin and flesh. They will be carried with the electric current applied without pain to the outside skin of the body. Microscopes will lay bare the vital organs, through the living flesh, of men and animals. The living body will to all medical purposes be transparent. Not only will it be possible for a physician to actually see a living, throbbing heart inside the chest, but he will be able to magnify and photograph any part of it. This work will be done with rays of invisible light. . . .

There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. . . . Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. . . .

Fast electric ships, crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, will go from New York to Liverpool in two days. . . . In storm they will dive below the water and there await fair weather.

Source: John Elfreth Watkins Jr., “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years,” Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1900, 8.