Thomas Edison's 2011 Predictions

Oracles come and go but Thomas Alva Edison, remembered as one of the 20th century's greatest inventors, came amazingly close to describing how technology would evolve during the course of the century. In an interview with the Miami Metropolis in 1911, Edison gave his predictions of the world in 2011. Here's a look at how he fared.

Edison predicted that electricity would supplant steam as the power source for trains. "A century hence it will be as remote as antiquity as the lumbering coach of Tudor days," he said.

Bingo.

Edison predicted that air travel would become a regular feature of our daily lives by 2011. "He will fly through the air, swifter than any swallow, at a speed of two hundred miles an hour, in colossal machines, which will enable him to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat his luncheon in Cheapside."

Edison, born during an era when wood featured as the main material in housing construction, predicted that steel would become so cheap and plentiful that it would emerge as a widely-used construction material.

Not to put words into the great man's mouth, but he did envision a time where "a book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes." Did he have an inkling that an e-reader might be in our future?

Nobody bats 1000 - not even Edison. He predicted we would have figured out how to turn base metals into gold, ringing in an era where he expected ocean liners make of solid gold from stem to stern,golden taxicabs, and gold substituted for steel in our drawing room suites. "Only steel will be the more durable, and thus the cheaper in the long run," he said. OK, so he blew that one big time. Still, a pretty good track record for someone doing the vision thing back in 1911