1912: What May Happen in the Next Hundred YearsThe Ladies' Home Journal;
What the Future Looked Like 100 Years Ago -- and 5 Predictions That Came True; 2/24/2012;
"Telephones around the world..."
1931: NY Times Views 2011 From 1931: "Technological progress, with its exponential law of increase, holds the key to the future. ... Humanity?s most versatile servant will be the electron tube. The communication and transportation inventions will smooth out regional differences and level us in some respects to uniformity....Communication by printed and spoken word and television [should become] much more common than at present, so that the whole earth will be one great neighborhood."
1934: Communications Act of 1934established US' Federal regulation of electronic communications; precedent for later Internet laws/proposals
1938: World Brain[ebook version] by H. G. Wells. "Without a World Encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles...The time is close at hand, when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica."
The Decades That Invented the Future: Part 1: 1900-1910Theory of Relativity; Toaster Heating Element; Football's Forward Pass; Tanks; Vacuum Tube; Gas-Powered Mercedes; Nintendo (playing cards); A Trip to the Moon; Bakelite; Radio; FBI; Kodak Brownie; 10/8/2012
Part 2: 1910sFlip-Flop Circuit; Panama Canal; Golf in US; Fighter Planes; Prohibition; Erector Set; First Crossword Puzzle; Electric Household Refrigerator; Modern Assembly Line; Superconductivity; Nikon; Snap-On Wrench; 10/25/2012
Part 3: 1920sR.U.R. (robots); IBM 80-Column Punch Card; Amphibious Warfare; Art Deco; Babe Ruth; Tri-motor Airplane; Leica I and the 35mm Standard; Polygraph; Scopes Monkey Trial; McKinsey and Company; Traffic Light; Mickey Mouse; 11/2/2012
Part 4: 1930sRadar; Works Progress Administration; Schrödinger's Cat; Pop Culture Characters; Nylon; Z1 computer by Zuse; Ballpoint Pen; Kodachrome; Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias; War of the Worlds; Electric Pinball; Volkswagen Beetle; 11/9/2012
1906: Vacuum tube: triode
1913: Crossword; "FUN's Word-Cross Puzzle"; OLLI Course: Crosswords: History