A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

[2] The chief difficulty in utilising the useful integument of wheat disappears when the whole grain is finely milled. [↑]

[3] It is necessary to say here, as an offset to possible misconstruction, that the word “evolution” has been purposely abstained from. The processes of evolution are far slower than the changes here contemplated. The latter are voluntary and purposeful, involving no constructional alteration in the physical frame of man, but only functional modifications, intentionally inaugurated and pursued. [↑]

CHAPTER III

THE MAN OF BUSINESS

Whatever changes may take place in the organisation of society during the present century, we may regard it as certain that the folk who

“Rise up to buy and sell again”

will be always with us. The man of business will possess many conveniences denied to the city man of to-day. It is, for instance, to be supposed that the inordinate defects of even the best telephone systems will be eliminated. When wireless communication of ideas has been perfected, of course the telephone exchange will disappear. Differential “tuning”—the process by which any wireless telephone will be able to be brought, as transmitter, into correspondence with any other wireless telephone, as receiver—will enable every merchant to “call up” every other merchant. Instead of, as at present, looking up his associate’s number in the directory, and getting connected by the clumsy junction of wires at an exchange office, the merchant will look up the tuning-formula, adjust his own telephone to it, and ring a bell, or otherwise employ means for attracting the attention of the man he wants to speak to. As a great proportion of all the business transacted will be done by telephones the frequent occurrence of disputes as to what has or has not been said in a given conversation will have rendered safeguards necessary. Consequently, every telephone will be attached to an instrument, developed from the phonograph, which will record whatever is said at both ends of the line. Precautions will have to be devised against eavesdropping. After communication is established, probably both parties to a conversation will retune their instruments to a fresh pitch, which, in cases requiring special secrecy, could be privately agreed upon beforehand.

The form which the records above suggested will ultimately assume must be a matter of conjecture. It is quite possible that the written word may in all departments of life lose some of its present vital importance. We may imagine, if we choose, that instead of creating records which can be read, we may find it advisable to create records that can be listened to: and some of the apparent inconveniences of this substitution may easily be supposed to be dispensed with. The handiness of a written memorandum is largely a matter of habit. A practised eye can “skim” a long document, and either through the use of black-type headlines, or by pure skill, alight upon exactly the passage required; and if it were necessary, in order to find a given passage, to listen to the whole document being read over by the recording phonograph, no doubt much time would be lost. We shall not be so extremely intolerant of loss of time, perhaps, in the new age, as some people imagine: but in any case, if the speed of the phonograph be imagined as adjustable, it will be perceived that we could then make it gabble parrotwise over the inessential, and let it linger with more deliberation over what we wanted to assure ourselves of. We could even “skip” useless portions—one can do this with phonographs already in use. Probably such aural records may be made capable of acceptance in courts of law, and the maxim verbum auditum manet will take the place of a well-known proverb of our day. Very likely business letters may some day take the form of conveniently-shaped tablets, made of some plastic material, and capable of being utilised by means of a talking machine.

Or if these changes seem too chimerical, we may essay the more difficult task of conceiving a means by which the spoken word may be directly translatable into print or typewriting. The waste of time and energy entailed by the present plan of dictating what we want to say to a stenographer or into a phonograph, for subsequent transcription, renders some sort of improvement urgently needful; nor are these wastes the only grievance, as the introduction of a second personality into the operation of recording speech introduces a simultaneous possibility of error, and an outrageous waste of time is caused by the necessity of reading over what one has dictated laboriously to a stenographer or into a phonograph, to make sure that it is correctly transcribed. It is obviously a much more difficult matter to translate speech directly into printed words than to translate it into something which may again produce the sounds of speech. The first step would be the invention of something which would print a phonetic representation of speech—as, for instance, shorthand of the kind invented by Sir Isaac Pitman. Even this requires us to imagine machinery of a kind whose very rudiments do not at present exist. Indeed, we can only conceive such an instrument by the use of the supposition that some entirely new manipulation of sound-waves will be discovered; and if we conceive that, there is no particular reason why we should hesitate before the notion of speech directly translated into print such as we use in everyday life. If we are going to limit the possibilities of the future by the actual achievements of the present, we shall certainly fall short of any adequate notion of what a hundred years’ accelerated progress may be capable of: and I do not see wherein the direct reproduction suggested is any more inconceivable than, for example, telephony, or even photography, must have been to a man of a hundred years ago. The greatest danger attending our attempt to preconceive the amenities of the next century is that we may limit our expectations too narrowly.