He foresaw far better night-illuminated streets than we have yet attained. Let us hope that we must not wait 750 years until cities are "as bright by night as by day"; nor New York's climate, man-controlled, to be "the finest on Earth," with temperatures perennially at 72, sunshine all day, rain for one hour only, every night! In that future we shall have reliable transfer of sun energy into electric by means of photo-electric elements responsive to ultra-violet radiation.
In Musak we already have the wide distribution of music which Mr. Gernsback foresaw in 1911; also our night baseball games, then first foretold. His airplanes launching from roof-tops we partly realize already in our helicopter mail service. But instead of his agglomeration of colored light-beams for direction of aviation we have the far reaching radio beacons, coupled with Loran.
Even today's mysterious "flying saucers" he foretold with nice detail!
Foreseeing the vast increase in global population (the world's gravest menace) Ralph has so deftly applied science to plant growth that we shall reap four crops of wheat per year in sun-heated glass houses of county-sized acreage, to feed the new billions. He fears not an overcrowded, 200 million metropolitan New York!
Only today I read of a recent system for using heat from deep earth for house-warming, now being commercialized. "Ralph" described the same arrangement forty years ago!
Here is liquid fertilizer sprayed as a crop accelerator; and plant-root stimulation by means of high-frequency currents, wholesale diathermy applied to farming; and many other improvements in farm procedure which make this book profitable reading for today's science-minded farmers.
The author foresaw a much-to-be-desired manufacture of news-print from the resultant excessive growth of grain stocks, thereby terminating today's wanton destruction of our forests for comic supplements and sexy pulps.
Last year in the Bell Laboratories I witnessed the recording on paper of the complexities of my voice, very much as Ralph described it in 1911 to his A.D. 2660 friends.