When Chattanooga Daily Times readers opened their morning paper on Aug. 23, 1923, there, above the fold, was a headline that must have grabbed their attention:
"Sees Workday Of Four Hours In The Future"
Were this newspaper to publish such a headline today, it certainly would grab readers' attention.
The source of the prediction was Dr. Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a German-born American engineer and electrical expert who -- in an apparently reprinted article from The New York Times -- was looking ahead 100 years to 2023 and to a world he foresaw as being transformed by electricity.
Certainly in that general prediction he was right. For electrical power has brought light, heating and air conditioning, all manner of time-saving gadgets and even cars to all parts of the world today.
Electricity, Steinmetz said, would allow people to work four hours, then "follow [their] natural bent" for the rest of their day. However, he said, people wouldn't be idle nonproducers.
"Leisure will be occupied in productive diversions, satisfying the particular instincts of the individual," he said.
If Steinmetz could see the hours wasted today on TikTok, selfies and video games, he might have changed his mind about that.
He did accurately predict the "expansion of leisure time and ever-increasing transportation facilities" allowing "millions who now live in cities" to "spend the major portion of their lives beyond the city in suburban areas or rural sections."
Of course today, with the proliferation of Chattanooga's downtown apartments and houses, you'd think most people wanted to move back into the city.
However, Steinmetz didn't quite get it right about suburban "approximity to idle soil space" leading to millions "raising most, if not all, of the food for their families as a pleasure-giving occupation."
Weekend farmers still have their place, but when you can buy Crispy Jalapeno Pieces and Chile Spiced (dried) Pineapple at Trader Joe's, who wants to take time mixing in all that helpful manure with your soil to stimulate better growth?
Of some curiosity also was Steinmetz's suggestion that 2023 might see communication with Mars.
"[I]f the United States went into the project of linking up a means of communication with Mars with the same intensity and thoroughness with which we entered and prosecuted the war (World War I)," he said, "it is not at all impossible that the plan would succeed."
Using the then-new process of radio-wave based wireless telegraphy (radio), Steinmetz figured "it would be a long process, no doubt, of counting, measuring and carefully recording the messages we received," and figuring a key to deciphering them, but "might conceivably be indications of an intelligence on Mars seeking communication with the intelligence of this planet."
Soaring beyond mere communication, of course, the U.S. first flew by Mars in 1964, first orbited it in 1971, first landed there in 1975 and first operated a rover there in 1996.
And there's this: When HuffPost asked celebrities in 2012 if they'd be willing to go to Mars, Kris Jenner of Kardashian parentage said yes. We're not sure whether Mars is the Kardashian home planet or if she'd just like an occasional escape from all things Kardashian.
Alas, Steinmetz also opined that "co-operative human effort will be the solution of most of the difficulties besetting mankind." Of course, he needn't have been known as the "Wizard of Schenectady" to figure that out. It had been the solution throughout history before his birth and would be in the century following his death the same year in which he predicted the future (though apparently not his).
"Wars," he said, "will continue until we have learned that [cooperation] lesson in its final aspect. I look for more wars because men and systems continue to struggle against each other instead of with each other."
We're looking at you, Putin and Russia.
"We have not yet sufficiently grasped the philosophy of Christianity," Steinmetz went on, "regardless of how many of us profess to be Christians."
In that, he said a mouthful. Today, here in the United States and abroad, many want to stamp out Christianity and all that goes with it. But many Christians would give up their church buildings, their creeds and their rules if everyone only adopted "the philosophy of Christianity," embodied by the commandments of Jesus to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind" and to "love your neighbor as yourself."
Steinmetz, in summation, said, "We are at the threshold of an age greater in its significance to the mass of humanity than even the hundred years through which we have passed, miraculous as the fruits of those years may seem to have been. No other period in recorded or unrecorded history witnessed such a flowering of man's ingenuity."
Not surprisingly, the next 100 years did the same. And so, likely, will the next 100 years.
So we'll be looking for that four-hour workday any time now.