As we enter the final year before the turn of the millennium, certain traditional millennial activities have already begun. Not the least of these are the experts' prognostications about what the next one hundred--or even one thousand--years will bring. As a public service, we at the Institute of Expertology are pleased to make available a select number of predictions by those who foresaw, with no less certainty, what was destined to happen this century. These predictions, we humbly suggest, should provide a fair and balanced basis on which to judge any forecast--in these pages or elsewhere. "Man will not fly for fifty years." --Wilbur Wright, to his brother Orville, 1901"The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of the many rumors to that effect." --Harper's Weekly, Aug. 2, 1902"{The nickel-iron battery will put} the gasoline buggies out of existence in no time . . . . In fifteen years, more electricity will be sold for electric vehicles than for light." --Thomas Alva Edison, 1910"50 years hence . . . {w}e shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." --Winston Churchill, "50 Years Hence," Popular Mechanics, 1932"Democracy will be dead by 1950." --John Langdon-Davies, British journalist and Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society, "A Short History of the Future," 1936"Gliders . . . {will be} the freight trains of the air. . . . We can visualize a locomotive plane leaving LaGuardia Field towing a train of six gliders in the very near future." --Grover Loening, consulting engineer for the Grumman Corp., quoted in "Miracles Ahead! Better Living in the Postwar World," 1944"Video won't be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring into a plywood box every night." --Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox Studios, c. 1946"Nuclear powered vacuum cleaners will probably be a reality in ten years." --Albert Lewyt, president of the Lewyt Vacuum Cleaner Corp., quoted in the New York Times, June 10, 1955"{A} few decades hence, energy may be free--just like the unmetered air." --John von Neumann, American scientist, "Can We Survive Technology," 1956"Castro in Cuba will be overthrown within months." --Kiplinger Washington Letter, Feb. 18, 1961"I'll have my first Zambian astronaut on the Moon by 1965. . . . We are using my own firing system, derived from the catapult." --Edward Mukaka Nkoloso, director-general of the Zambia National Academy of Space Research, Nov. 3, 1964"Castro's finished. It's just a question of how quickly it happens." --Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of defense, "Larry King Live," March 4, 1991"It looks like Republican presidents for as far as the eye can see." --Earl Black, then professor of government and international studies at the University of South Carolina, quoted in the Boston Globe, March 3, 1991"{C}loning mammals . . . is theoretically impossible with today's technology--and with any technology realistically within sight." --Michael A. Frohman, developmental biologist, in a letter published in Newsday, July 6, 1993"Armageddon will occur at the end of this century. Only a race of compassionate sages will survive. Their leader will come from Japan." --His Holiness, the Master Shoko Asahara (leader of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo), 1992 As of this writing, the jury is still out on the accuracy of His Holiness's startling prediction (although, in 1995, Asahara did offer the world a sneak preview of what Armageddon and the subsequent reign of compassionate sages would be like by allegedly masterminding a poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway system). Check these pages one year from today for a further report. Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky are editors of "The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation" (Villard Books).
