8 Bizarre Futurist Predictions That Never Came True

A rendering that depicts the future city of Liverpool.

By Rebecca Hiscott2014-03-19 10:06:59 UTC

Our visions of the future have always been more complex than hoverboards and self-lacing sneakers.

Sure, there were the various tropes from many bad sci-fi movies (and a few good ones), such as food in pill form, flying cars, personal jetpacks and robot butlers. But futurists also envisioned brave new worlds that have since been entirely forgotten the death of the letters C, X and Q, for example, not to mention the use of discarded underwear to manufacture candy (ew).

We doff our caps to Paleofuture for making these future-happy predictions from years hence so easily available. Below, we've resuscitated a few of our favorites, which have yet to come true.

"These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible," begins a 1900 article in Ladies' Home Journal. "Yet they have come from the most conservative and learned minds in America."

These "learned minds" suggested that by the year 2000, certain letters of the alphabet would simply vanish: "There will be no C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will be second."

In this French caricature called "Voyage a la lune" ("Journey to the moon"), a man rides a bicycle-like flying machine while looking through a telescope.

In 1909, Jules Bois, alternately referred to by The New York Times as a "mystic," a "litterateur" and a "Frenchman," rightly predicted that the era's ideal of feminine beauty would be overturned: "Physical weakness, extreme delicacy of physiognomy and acquiescence in a mere secondary position in the social organization will have given place to a type in which beauty and muscular development will be combined." (See: fitspo.)

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8 Bizarre Futurist Predictions That Never Came True