One of the more enduring activities of human beings has always
been to imagine what the future will bring. We all do it, some more than
others.
It's what separates us from the rest of earth's creatures,
most of which are too consumed with daily survival to think past their last
meal or their next one.
As authors of historical fiction we invent characters and
put them in various bygone eras. Then we create conflict for them to deal with,
people to love and to hate, obstacles to overcome, tragedy to rise above, and joyous
moments to take pleasure in.
But how often do we have our characters speculate about what
the world will look like in the future?
Not often, I am sure. And the reason is probably the same
one I gave for earth's "other" creatures. Our characters are often dealing
with one conflict after another or just trying to survive. What the world will
look like one hundred, two hundred or three hundred years is simply not within
their intellectual compass.
Authors who write science fiction and specifically books
about time travel think about these things all the time. I do and I don't even
write science fiction (though I do enjoy a good time travel story when I find
one).
So what has all of this got to do with historical novels?
you may be asking.
I think having characters wonder about the future either via
dialogue or in unspoken reflection adds another dimension to the people we
create in eras such as the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment or, in
the case of my book, the 19th Century.
So how might we do that? Well, considering that truth is
always stranger than fiction, you might examine predictions made about the
future from some pretty famous and creative people.
Recently someone sent me a copy of a story that appeared in
the 1911 edition of the now defunct Miami
Metropolis newspaper.
 |
| Thomas Alva Edison |
The story was an interview with none other than Thomas
Edison in which America's most famous inventor made some rather astounding
predictions about the future. Some were quite accurate and some were, shall we
say, a bit off target.
For example, he rather amazingly predicts the e-book reader
and at the same time predicts by 2011 we will be able to transmute metals and turn
iron into gold. Ahem....
Here is that article in its entirety. Enjoy.
"What will the world be a hundred years hence?
None but a wizard dare raise the curtain and disclose the
secrets of the future; and what wizard can do it with so sure a hand as Mr.
Thomas Alva Edison, who has wrested so many secrets from jealous Nature? He
alone of all men who live has the necessary courage and gift of foresight, and
he has not shrunk from the venture.
Already, Mr. Edison tells us, the steam engine is
emitting its last gasps. A century hence it will be as remote as antiquity as
the lumbering coach of Tudor days, which took a week to travel from Yorkshire
to London. In the year 2011 such railway trains as survive will be driven at
incredible speed by electricity (which will also be the motive force of all the
world's machinery), generated by "hydraulic" wheels.
But the traveler of the future, says a writer in Answers,
will largely scorn such earth crawling. He will fly through the air, swifter
than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal
machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in
Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside.
The house of the next century will be furnished from
basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost — of steel so
light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a
drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a
steel cradle; his father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and
his mother's boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings,
converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or
any other wood her ladyship fancies.
Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of
nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single
volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the
equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would
suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume
would weigh less than a pound.
Already Mr. Edison can produce a pound weight of these
nickel leaves, more flexible than paper and ten times as durable, at a cost of
five shillings. In a hundred years' time the cost will probably be reduced to a
tenth.
More amazing still, this American wizard sounds the death
knell of gold as a precious metal. "Gold," he says, "has even
now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common
and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel.
"We are already on the verge of discovering the
secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter,
though combined in different proportions."
Before long it will be an easy matter to convert a truck
load of iron bars into as many bars of virgin gold.
In the magical days to come there is no reason why our
great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern; why we should not
ride in golden taxicabs, or substituted gold for steel in our drawing room
suites. Only steel will be the more durable, and thus the cheaper in the long
run."
Golden ocean liners
and cabs? I think we can all be thankful that Edison missed the boat (and the
taxi) on that one.
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