A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

During the last twenty-five or thirty years of the nineteenth century the tendency of workers in great cities was more and more towards suburban life, men travelling to and from the cities in increasing numbers, to increasing distances, and at increasing speeds. Even mechanics, even labourers and the other humbler wage-earners (to say nothing of clerks not earning much more, but spending their money in a different manner) nowadays travel considerable distances to their work. But in spite of what is complacently regarded (by railway and tramway directors) as rapid conveyance, there is lately manifest an increasing impatience against the time subtracted from men’s leisure by the two daily journeys, an impatience very naturally increased in the case of manual workers of both sexes by the utter inadequacy of the legislative control imposed upon railway and tramway companies.

Crowded trams and trains, with desperate men and weak women fighting a daily battle for conveyance before all the cheap trips have been made, inflict a shameful degradation upon the class for which Parliament makes illusory provision in railway and tramway Acts. As a consequence of this difficulty, and also because of the early hour at which the companies are allowed to cease carrying working-folk at the workmen’s fare, many men and women are compelled to waste some hours of their scanty leisure every day between the arrival of their trains and the opening of their workshops, a cruelty for which the blame may be pretty equally apportioned to Parliament and the company directors. The result of it is that many of the poor prefer the evil of overcrowding in cities before the greater evil of wasted time and degrading travel. As time goes on, no doubt the monopolists of transportation will be compelled, as their own necessities increase and so bring them under the hand of the legislature, to serve more adequately the necessities of the majority. But even so, and as long as the effective speed of conveyance is limited by the lack of permanent-way space and the necessity for frequent stations, the impatience even now manifested, and manifested chiefly by the class which suffers least from loss of time in travel, will lead to concentration. Taking London as an example, it may be said that the Victorian age was the age of the suburbs. But few people now live in the suburbs of London who can afford to live anywhere else. Either they move right out into the country, seeking a spot on some main line where the greater distance and less-frequent train service is made up for by speedy and uninterrupted journeys; or they come into London and occupy houses or flats within easy reach of their working head-quarters. The suburbs are given over to those who cannot afford either of these expedients, or who, having been brought up there, are retained by a sort of inertia. Ultimately, as the demand for town space becomes intensified, two things will happen. First of all, the restrictions which many cities, ignoring the freedom of New York and Chicago, impose upon the erection of excessively high buildings, will go by the board. The shutting out of sunlight and fresh air will be the subject of compensations to be presently explained, and thirty, forty, fifty or a hundred-storey houses, and houses which perhaps burrow to some distance underground, will, by virtue of the same compensations, house a vast, concentrated population impatient of daily travel. As the demand for homes increases, and even the high buildings cannot cope with it, the cities will push their way outwards, repopulating the rebuilt suburbs. This kind of thing will have a tendency to correct itself. Rents will be high in proportion to position near the centre. But a limit of toleration will be reached, and as certain improvements will have been effected in transport, there will ultimately be a reaction, and people will again go right out to the country, as long as there is any country left.

Before discussing these improvements, however, it will be convenient to examine the conveniences, social and sanitary, of the homes of the new age. The greatest convenience of all, no doubt, will be the modification and partial elimination of the domestic servant. There is every reason to believe that the great difficulties of the servant question as at present experienced will solve themselves, forming in part an instance of the moral changes, accompanying material invention but only partly resulting from it, which the new age is certain to experience. It is usual to lay the blame of the unsatisfactory character and atrocious inefficiency of the domestic servants of our own day on the institution of free education. They are much more due to the absence of any education worthy of the name, and to the imperfect civilisation of modern houses. Thirty-five years or so are but an instant in the life of an institution so overwhelmingly more important in its possibilities than any other subject of legislation as State-compelled education of the people. No one appears to have recognised that character-making, which Herbert Spencer called the most important object which can engage the attention of the legislator, is the only true object of education, free or otherwise. When politicians have talked of the necessity of national education, the argument they have used was that Germans are better chemists than we are. When they praised the usefulness of modern languages it was in terms of commercial utility. “Modern languages, in fact” (a recent critic remarked), “make a good bagman.” It is inept to despair of free education because free education has produced no very satisfactory results while conceived of as a process of shoving undesired knowledge into the children of the poor. Looking, as everyone not hidebound by pessimism must look, for a great enlightenment of the law-giving class when the system of party politics, already beginning to show signs of decay, has ceased to hold all legislation in its blighting hand, we have every reason to expect that the true uses of education will be perceived and attained long before the end of the period contemplated when we speak of the new age. And then, one very great factor in the servant question will have been satisfactorily solved, even if other conditions have not conducted us nearly all the way to the solution beforehand.

For, while making every allowance for the evil effects of education, wrongly conceived and improperly administered, on the character of women destined to become servants, it must be allowed that much of what we call the servant difficulty could be cured now, and will unquestionably be cured before long, by inventions capable of abolishing the grievances which lead to it. These grievances are real and remediable. I do not refer to the confinement, restraint and gross lack of consideration on the part of employers which lead young women of the class from which servants are drawn to prefer labour in factories and elsewhere, in conditions far less comfortable, before domestic service; but to our utter lack of ingenuity in removing the irksomeness and degradation of much domestic labour. Some coming inventions calculated to improve the lot of Mary Jane will now be described.

In the first place (as Mr H. G. Wells has pointed out, without apparently being aware that buildings already exist in which some of his ideas have been anticipated), modern rooms, equally with those of all time, seem to have been constructed so as to make it as difficult as possible to keep them clean. Square corners and rectangular junctions of wall and floor, wall and ceiling, will certainly before long be replaced everywhere by curves. But the work of house cleaning will be rendered easy and unlaborious by another invention, already indeed in existence on a large scale, but eventually capable of being rendered portable. I mean a contrivance for applying a vacuum to any desired spot. There is a very ingenious but rather noisy engine already in use for pumping the dust out of carpets, curtains and furniture. In the houses of the future handy contrivances of various shapes, all independent of any engine, will be found, furnished with elastic nozzles on the outside and with some sort of appliance capable of instantly exhausting the air within. Such a utensil wheeled over the floor will remove instantly every particle of dust from the surface and below the surface of the carpet, at the same time picking up any such débris as scraps of paper, pins, and other decidua of the previous day. A similar instrument, differently shaped, will clean the curtains, supposing curtains to be still in use at the time, and will dust the chairs and tables—though there will not be anything like so much dust as there is now, nearly all kinds of combustion being abolished. The kitchen fire will of course be an electric furnace: “o’ my word we’ll not carry coals.” Lighting will all be electric, and no doubt wireless. The abolition of horse traffic in cities, and the use of the vacuum apparatus which will be continuously at work in all streets, keeping them dry and free from mud, will practically remove the necessity for boot brushing, even supposing that we shall still wear boots: every man and woman in dressing will pass a vacuum instrument over his and her clothes and get rid of even the little dust existing—for we shall be more and more intolerant of dirt in any form, having by that time fully realised how dangerous dirt is. The new age will be a clean age. A lady of the year 2000 who could be miraculously transported back to London at the present moment would probably faint (they will not have ceased fainting) at the intolerable disgustingness of what is, I suppose, now one of the cleanest cities in the world, even if the cruelty of employing horses for traction, and the frightful recklessness of allowing them to soil the streets in which people walk, did not overpower her susceptibilities in another way.

Cooking will perhaps not be done at all on any large scale at home, in flat-homes at all events; and in any case, for reasons which will hereafter become apparent, cooking will be a much less disgusting process than it is to-day. In no case will the domestic servant of a hundred years hence be called upon to stand over a roaring fire, laid by herself, and to be cleaned up by herself when done with, in order to cook the family dinner. Every measure of heat—controllable in gradations of ten degrees or so—will be furnished in electrically-fitted receptacles, with or without water jackets or steam jackets: and unquestionably all cooking will be done in hermetically-closed vessels. We shall not much longer do most of our cooking by such a wasteful and unwholesome method as boiling, whereby the important soluble salts of nearly all food are callously thrown away. As, for reasons to be developed hereafter, it is quite certain that animal food will have been wholly abandoned before the end of this century, the débris of the kitchen will be much more manageable than at present, and the kitchen sink will cease to be, during a great part of the day, a place of unapproachable loathsomeness. On the other hand, its conveniences will have been greatly increased. It is difficult to understand how the old-world fashion of (for instance) “washing up” plates and dishes can have endured so long. Of course, in the new age, these utensils will be simply dropped one by one into an automatic receptacle; swilled clean by water delivered with force and charged with nascent oxygen; dried by electric heat; and polished by electric force; being finally oxygen-bathed as a superfluous act of sanitary cleanliness before being sent to table again. And all that has come off the plates will drop through the scullery floor into the destructor beneath to be oxygenated and made away with.

Here we have most of the distasteful elements of domestic service got rid of. Naturally lifts of various kinds, driven by the same force (whatever it is) which lights and warms the house, will be everywhere in evidence. The plan of attaining the upper part of a small house by climbing, on every occasion, a sort of wooden hill, covered with carpet of questionable cleanliness, will of course have been abandoned: it is doubtful whether staircases will be built at all after the next two or three decades. And it is likely that the more refined sentiment of the new age will recoil before the spectacle of menial service at the table. Not because they will despise, but because they will respect, their domestic assistants, hostesses will dislike to have their guests waited upon in a servile manner during meals by plush-breeched flunkeys of the male, or neat-handed Phyllises of the female, sex. Well-arranged houses will have the kitchen on a level with the dining-room, and the dividing wall will be so contrived that a table, ready laid at each course, can be made to slide through it into the presence of the seated guests. An immense amount of running to and fro between kitchen and dining-room, and of lifting food and table-ware into and out of elevators, will thus be obviated, to the vast gastronomic improvement of the meal and the salvation of servants’ time.

Naturally the bedrooms of the new age will have many amenities lacking to our own. It is not too much to anticipate that we shall have learned enough of plumbing to be able to connect baths, wash-basins and other necessary fittings with the drains without poisoning ourselves, and the inconvenient modern “wash-stand” with its unreticent adjuncts will decently disappear. It cannot be very long—probably it will only be a few years—before some kind of reasonable control is exercised over the technical education of plumbers.[1]

Thus the bedroom of the new age will be a much more convenient and satisfactory apartment than the one we slept in last night, and another irksome and unelevating part of the domestic work of our servants will be eliminated. But the sleeping-apartments, and indeed all apartments in city homes, will contain yet another very valuable and necessary article of furniture—the oxygenator. Nearly all the unhealthiness and the pinched, weary greyness of town-dwellers to-day could be cured by fresh air. Everyone is familiar with the improvement which can be effected in the health and appearance of a city family by even a short visit to the seaside or the country—an improvement which it happens to be fashionable just now to attribute, in the former case, to the presence of ozone in the sea air. The fact that holiday-makers are able to endure the smell of slowly-decaying seaweed with a dash of putrescent fish about it, which is called “sea-air,” without injury, and even to pick up health in the presence of it, is more due to the absence of carbon dioxide and other deleterious gases of the towns than to anything else. The beneficent effects of country air are practically all due to the power possessed by green vegetation of superoxygenating the surrounding air. The atmosphere of cities, or at all events of city homes, will presently be freed from the products of combustion and respiration, and endowed with a slightly-increased proportion of oxygen, by artificial means. And especially in bedrooms, rendered to-day stuffy and unhealthy by the idiotic fear of night air which an effete tradition has handed down to us, will this reform be in evidence. Prudent people to-day insist on large bedroom windows—preferably of the French-door pattern—and keep them wide open all night. But this is attended by inconveniences in cold and wet weather; and while our grandchildren will still keep their windows open all night in all weathers, they will not be content with this alone. There will be a chemical apparatus hidden away in some corner, or built into the wall, which will absorb carbon dioxide and at the same time slowly give off a certain amount of oxygen—just enough to raise the oxygenation of the air to the standard of the best country places. And similar appliances will be at work in the streets of our cities, so that town air will be just as wholesome, just as tonic and invigorating, as country air. If the theory that the presence of ozone (that is, allotropic oxygen) in the sea air is beneficent stand the test of time, no doubt ozonators will form part of these appliances: but in any case, as the high buildings of the new age will keep out the sunlight, electric light, carrying all the ray-activity of sunlight, and just as capable of fostering life and vegetation, will serve the streets. Thus, so far as hygiene goes, town life will be on a par with country life: but many people will prefer the country, and means will have to be provided to render homes in the country compatible with work in the cities. This brings us to the question of transport.

I do not think that people will, within the next hundred years at all events, travel to and from work in flying-machines. But no doubt the system of railway transport will be revolutionised. What makes suburban travel so slow is, not so much lack of speed on the part of the trains, as the necessity for frequent stoppage. You cannot satisfactorily run a train at sixty miles an hour and stop it every minute or so: otherwise sixty miles an hour would be quite fast enough, for some decades at least, to satisfy all requirements of suburban traffic, though it would be, and indeed is, ridiculously inadequate for long-distance travelling. The expense of increased permanent-way hampers railway management, and as there is no possibility of getting more land to increase the number of available tracks, some method will have to be devised for running one train over the top of another—perhaps to the height of several storeys, not necessarily provided with supporting rails: for we may very conceivably have discovered means by which vehicles can be propelled above the ground in some kind of guide-ways, doing away with the great loss of power caused by wheel friction; that is to say, the guides will direct, but not support, the carriages. The clumsy device of locomotive engines will have been dispensed with. Whatever power is employed to drive the trains of the next century will certainly be conveyed to them from central power-houses.