toekomstmuziek

Het is weer tijd voor oudejaarsoverzichten. Dan is het wel leuk om te lezen wat men zich op de rand van 1907/1908 voorstelde van wat komen ging, volgens Jim Rasenberger in diens boek America, 1908. Vooral de vooruitziende blik van Hampton’s Magazine is opmerkelijk.

This morning [December 31, 1907], The New York World had published an essay to greet the New Year in which the paper’s editors looked back to the past, then ahead into the future. The title of the piece was simply “1808 – 1908 – 2008.” The World began by noting how far the country had progressed over the previous century. In 1808 […] the country’s population was a mere seven million souls. The federal government was underfunded and ineffectual.

The state of technology—of transportation, communication, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing—was barely more advanced than during the Middle Ages of Europe.

Now, in 1908, with the population of America at almost ninety million, the federal revenue was forty times greater than it had been a century earlier and America was on a par with Britain and Germany as a global power. U.S. citizens enjoyed the highest per-capita income in the world and were blessed with the marvels of railroads and automobiles, telegraph and telephone, electricity and gas. Banks of high-speed elevators zipped through vertical shafts of the tallest buildings on earth. Pneumatic tubes whisked mail between farflung post offices in minutes. Men shaved their whiskers with disposable razor blades and women cleaned their homes with remarkable new devices called vacuums. Couples danced to the Victrola in the comfort of their living rooms and snuggled in dark theaters to watch the flickering images of the Vitagraph. Invisible words volleyed across the oceans between the giant antennas of Marconi’s wireless telegraph, while American engineers cut a fifty-mile canal through the Isthmus of Panama.

From the glories of the present, The World turned to the question of the future: “What will the year 2008 bring us? What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?” The U.S. population of 2008 would be 472 million, predicted The World. “We may have gyroscopic trains as broad as houses swinging at 200 miles an hour up steep grades and around dizzying curves. We may have aero planes winging the once unconquerable air. The tides that ebb and flow to waste, may take the place of our spent coal and flash their strength by wire to every point of need. Who can say?”

[…]

Meanwhile, the very air seemed charged—it was, actually—with the possibilities of the infant wireless technology. “When the expectations of wireless experts are realized everyone will have his own pocket telephone and may be called wherever he happens to be,” Hampton’s Magazine daringly predicted in 1908, “The citizen of the wireless age will walk abroad with a receiving apparatus compactly arranged in his hat and tuned to that one of myriad vibrations by which he has chosen to be called… When that invention is perfected, we shall have a new series of daily miracles.”

Copyright © 2007 by Scribner Book Company.