From the Bad Predictions File

I found this clip on an apparently defunct blog called Shopoholic. It is a 1930s look at what fashions will be like in the year 2000. I don't remember wearing anything that looked like this in 2000, although the dress with the braiding does look like something concocted by a Project Runway contestant, and the idea that we'd be wearing telephones seems to be spot on.

Bad Predictions: Russian Style

Taking a break from the broke briefly to revisit the topic of the 2001 book Bad Predictions.

The web site English Russia today is featuring clips of visions of the year 2010 published in the Soviet press 50 years ago. I'm sure it is funniest if you can read Russian, but each clip is followed by a little explanation in English.

Weather Control by 2000?

In honor of the news that my book Blame it on the Rain, which discusses how weather changed history, is soon to be published in Polish…

Paleo-Future, a Web site devoted to past futurism, recently posted a clip from a 1966 program 2000 A.D. The clip predicts a 3 day work week by 2000.

From there it goes on to predict weather control: "My estimate is that we will start to work seriously to modify thunderclouds to reduce lightning. I think that we'll be able to have some sort of estimate of whether we can control tornadoes and such local severe storms."

Weather control is no mere whimsy. As I noted in Blame it on the Rain, scientists (and quite a few quacks) have been working on it for years. They're just not very good at it.

In the late 19th century the Weather Bureau and the Department of Agriculture funded various tests in which explosives were unleashed in the clouds to release their rain. Money that The Chicago Times believed would have been “less ridiculously employed if it were devoted to the attempted manufacture of whistles out of pig’s tails.”

One of the first successful attempts was in 1946 when a high school dropout named Vincent Schaefer, who was employed by General Electric, flew above the Schenectady, New York clouds and dropped six pounds of dry ice into them. The result was snow.

A year later, Schaefer and Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, tried to change the course of a hurricane threatening the Florida coast. They dumped almost 200 pounds of dry ice into its eye. As they predicted, the storm changed direction. The experiment would have been a complete success were it not for the fact that the new path put the storm on a collision course with Savannah, Georgia, where it did about $5 million in damage.

As early as 1957, a report of Eisenhower’s advisory committee noted that weather control could become a “more important weapon than the atom bomb.” In 1966, the U.S. got a chance to try it out. “Project Popeye” dispensed a rain-making agent into the clouds of Vietnam and extended the monsoon season in order to increase the mud on the Ho Chi Minh trail—the main enemy supply route to South Vietnam. Whether or not these attempts were successful depends on whose report you read.

Of course, American generals were not the only ones to think of this. In Soviet Russia scientists were looking for ways to modify weather using laser technology. Recently declassified documents in England reveal that a storm that dropped 9 inches of rain in only 21 hours in August of 1952 came after a secret rainmaking experiment in which the military seeded clouds with silver iodine powder. The storm created a flood that swept through the costal town of Lynmouth destroying bridges, buildings and roads. The flood killed 34 people.

Weather control seems, for the foreseeable future, to remain the stuff of science fiction.

Germany's Dumbest Bank

Conde Nast Portfolio ran a story today with the headline "Credit Crisis Schadenfreude."

It quotes Germany's finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, saying that the credit crisis threatens the United States' status as a financial superpower.

"The United States will lose its status as the superpower in the world financial system," he said. "The world financial system will become more multipolar." (I would argue that this doesn't actually qualify as Schadenfreude, but as simple criticism and prediction, the real Schadenfreude is to come...)

Before you get too worried, I should note that German bankers do not seem to have a great knack for prediction. I remind you of an article I posted here in may.

"German Bundesbankers...are not concerned about any direct fallout from the US mortgage crisis," wrote Ralph Atkins in the Financial Times.

The article's headline was "Schadenfreude stirs in resilient Germany."

Conde Nast's article today noted with a smirk that "Herr Minister has a personal reason to be bitter about the credit crisis. Steinbrück is on the supervisory board of the state-controlled bank KfW, which transferred some $425 million to Lehman Brothers a little more than an hour before the Wall Street firm filed for bankruptcy protection. 'Germany's Dumbest Bank!' screamed the front-page headline in the newspaper Bild."

Past Futures

Back in 1999, I wrote a book called Bad Predictions. It is ironically both my rarest book on the market, and the one I have the most copies of in my basement. Go figure.

The project grew out of a passion of mine-- used book stores. I love ephemera and books that were only intended for their era. I collect out of date etiquette manuals and I find it hard to resist old magazines and newspaper archives that discuss past events and attitudes using the language of their own day.

As we were approaching the year 2000, I began to collect books by past futurists with a view to cataloging their mistakes. Regardless of their correctness or incorrectness I loved their imagination. In fact, I most admired those who had a bold enough vision to risk being utterly wrong.

If you enjoy this kind of thing too, I recomend the blog Paleo-Future. It is full of great scans of the flying cars, household robots and space craft we were supposed to have by now.

Bad Predictions Blow Out! For a limited time, I am selling copies of my 2000 book Bad Predictions, cover price $15.95, for just $5.00. Get a brand new, autographed, hard to find elsewhere book for an incredibly low price by following the link.