Page 25 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - February 2014 Edition

America’s Greatest Unknown Seer John Elspeth Watkins America’s Greatest Unknown Seer If you read the National Enquirer at the checkout counter of your local supermarket, you’ve seen that people like Jeanne Dixon are always trying to predict the future, like Dr Louis Turi, Elizabeth Joyce, and others who have been guests on The ‘X’ Zone Radio Show. The truth s that they rarely get it right, and when they don’t, they try their very best to fit news events of the day to fit the predictions that they make. But in 1900, John Watkins did. In an article written for the Ladies Home Journal, he looked a century into the future and foresaw subways, air conditioning, satellite TV, and lots more. No one has ever come close to his feat. What follows is a small excerpt. years instead of thirty-five as at present - for he “Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are will reside in the suburbs.” today. Farmers will own automobile hay- BACKGROUND: wagons, lows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one- “Hot and cold air from spigots. Hot or cold air pound motor in one of those vehicles will do the John Elspeth Watkins was a Philadelphia will be turned on from spigots to regulate the work of a pair of horses or more…Automobiles newspaperman whose predictions were recently temperature of a house as we now turn on hot or will have been substituted for every horse rediscovered by two Indiana professors. They cold water from spigots to regulate the vehicle now known…The horse in harness will call him “The Seer of the Century” and note that temperature of the bath…Rising early to build be as scarce, if, indeed, not scarcer, then as the he was lucky enough to see many of his the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times. yoked ox is today.” predictions come true before dying in the ‘40s. Homes will have no chimneys, because no What’s amazing about these smoke will be created within their walls.” “Everybody will walk ten miles. Gymnastics predictions? Remember what was going on in will begin in the nursery, where toys and games 1900: Production on primitive autos had just “No mosquitoes nor flies. Boards of health will be designed to strengthen the muscles. begun; they were still a novelty. People lived in will have destroyed all mosquito haunts and Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. squalor and ill health and died young. There was breeding grounds, drained all stagnant pools, Every school, college and community will have no such thing as an airplane. There was no filled in all swamp-lands, and chemically a complete gymnasium…A man or woman radio; the first feature movie hadn’t yet been treated all still-water streams. The unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be made; the telephone had been invented a scant extermination of the horse and its stable will regarded as a weakling.” 25 years earlier. It was a whole different world - reduce the house-fly.” yet somehow, Watkins described ours in detail. “There will be no wild animals except in “These prophecies,” he wrote in his “Ready-cooked meals will be bought from menageries. Rats and mice will have been introduction, “will seem strange, almost establishments similar to our bakeries of exterminated. The horse will have become impossible.” today. Such wholesale cookery will be done in practically extinct…The automobile will have It’s a fascinating measure of how things electric laboratories…equipped with electric driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have have changed to realize that our way of life stoves, and all sorts of electric devices, such as no horns. They will be unable to run faster than seemed like science fiction to the average coffee-grinders, egg-beaters, stirrers, shakers, the fattened hog of today. Food animals will be American of 1900. parers, meat-choppers, meat-saws, potato- bred to expend practically all of their life energy mashers, lemon-squeezers, dishwashers, dish- in producing meat, milk, wool and other by- EXCERPTS FROM WATKINS’S dryers and the like. All such utensils will be products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will PREDICTIONS washed in chemicals fatal to disease microbes.” have been neglected.” “Man will see around the world. Persons and “There will be no street cars in our large “Submarine boats submerged for days will be things of all kinds will be brought within focus cities. All traffic will be below or high above capable of wiping a whole navy off the face of of cameras connected electrically with screens the ground when brought within city limits. In the deep. at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles most cities it will be confined to broad subways at a span. American audiences in their theatres or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to “To England in two days. Fats electric ships, will view upon huge curtains before them the high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, coronations of kings in Europe or the progress leading to the top. These underground or will go from New York to Liverpool in Two of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing overhead streets will teem with automobile days. The bodies of these ships will be built these distant scenes to the very doors of people passenger coaches and freight wagons, with above the waves. They will be supported upon will be connected with a giant telephone cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be runners, somewhat like those of the sleigh. apparatus transmitting each incidental sound reserved for express trains. Cities, therefore, These runners will be very buoyant. Upon their into its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a will be free from all noises.” [Ed. Note: Not undersides will be apertures expelling jets of air. great distant battle will be heard to boom when quite.] In this way a film of air will be kept between seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor them and the water’s surface. This film, or singer will be heard t utter words or music “Photographs will be telegraphed from any together with the small surface of the runners, when seen to move.” distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred will reduce friction against the waves to the years hence snapshots of its most striking events smallest possible degree.” [Ed. Note: “The American will be taller from one or two will be published in the newspapers an hour Hydrofoils.] inches. His increase in stature will result from later. Even today photographs are being better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, telegraphed over short distances. Photographs Continued on Page 28 sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.”