Ladies’ Home Journal 1900 Predictions: 68 Items, 48 Scored

Where did the forecast appear?

The Journal was a ten-cent monthly, as its own poster for May 1900 shows, and the December 1900 issue set Watkins’s page among fiction, household features and advertising (Exhibit A, contents). His forecast ran as 28 short paragraphs, each opening with a headline, from population and spelling to roses and medicine. Some of it was already under way. The page itself notes that photographs were being telegraphed over short distances.

Poster for the May 1900 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, designed by Frank Walter Taylor. The predictions appeared seven months later, in the December 1900 issue.

The issue date matters as much as the text. A dated magazine shows that the forecasts were in print by December 1900 at the latest, so nothing that happened later could have shaped the wording. That kind of proof is set out on how a printed date sets the latest possible date.

How was the forecast split?

Each of the 28 paragraphs gave at least one item. A further sentence became its own item when it named something else that could be checked in 2000. The paragraph on war gave six items; most others gave one to three. Sentences that describe 1900, give reasons, or explain how an item would work were not scored, and neither were other side details inside a paragraph, such as figs grown across the country or ships that dive in a storm.

Items per paragraph, paragraphs 1 to 28 in the order printed. Drawn from the item table published with this page.

The list of 68 items was fixed on November 5, 2026, before any item was graded, and it is the same list as the downloadable table. Every item carries the end of 2000 as its deadline, except item 21, which names its own years: hard coal lasting to 2050 or 2100 and soft coal to 2200 or 2300. The table restates each claim in the site’s own words. Where a word has shifted since 1900, the item follows the article’s own usage: its air-ships float, and it names flying machines separately, so item 36 is scored on lighter-than-air craft, not airplanes.

The ledger

Most items are settled by federal statistics for 1997 to 2001. The main ones are the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1999 and 2001 (Exhibits H and I) and The World Factbook 2000 (Exhibit J). Accounts printed between 1917 and 1922 settle the early inventions (Exhibits C to E), and federal reports (Exhibits F and G) and later studies (Exhibits K to R) settle the items on health, livestock, crops and flowers.

Grade counts for the 68 items, with the strict and lenient rates over the 48 scorable items. Drawn from the item table published with this page.

The 68 items, with deadlines, tests, grades, reasons and sources (CSV) (where the data comes from) Data: John Elfreth Watkins Jr., “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years,” The Ladies’ Home Journal (December 1900); Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999 and 2001; The World Factbook 2000; and the other sources named in each row

By the strict count, 11 of the 48 scorable items are hits, or 23%. By the lenient count, which adds the 16 partial hits, 27 of 48 hold up, or 56%. Twenty items are left out of both counts. Every item was rechecked on November 6, 2026, and the 22 whose grade changed keep their earlier grade in the previous_grade column of the download.

What came true?

Most of the hits cluster in communication and war. Color photography was in use by 1917 (Exhibit C), and by 2000, 24 ocean cable systems and 61 Intelsat earth stations carried American calls abroad (Exhibit J). Aircraft dropping bombs, armored vehicles on tracks and photographs taken over enemy lines all appeared in the First World War (Exhibits D and E).

The forecast on health counts only as a partial hit. It said Americans would live 50 years instead of 35, which this page reads as a figure to replace the old one, not a floor. Lives did grow longer, but far past the forecast: the federal series gives 76.5 years of life expected at birth in 1997 (Exhibit H, Table 1421), so the rise came true and the figure did not. For 1900 itself the same series gives 47.3 years, counting only the states that then registered deaths, well above the 35 printed in the article.

Life expectancy at birth: the figures in the 1900 article against the record for 1900 (death-registration states only) and 1997. Drawn from Watkins (Exhibit A, p. 8) and the Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999, Table 1421 (Exhibit H).

Several partial hits came true in one part only. Homes almost stopped burning coal, which was the main heating fuel in under 0.2 percent of them in 1999, yet coal made about 56 percent of utility electricity (Exhibit I, Tables 911 and 962). Refrigerators reached nearly every home, but they made cold by compressing a gas, the method described in 1917 (Exhibit C), not with liquid air. Pictures went by wire over hundreds of miles by 1917 (Exhibit C), but no source read here shows news pictures printed within an hour.

What missed, and what can’t be scored?

The misses run through population, cities, spelling and farming. The United States counted 281.4 million people in 2000 and its territories about 4.3 million more, far from 350 to 500 million, and no Latin American country had joined the Union (Exhibits I and J). Street noise or traffic was reported at about 29 million homes in 1999 (Exhibit I, Table 961).

Illustration

An illustration, not a record: a city street around 1900, loud with horse traffic. The forecast of cities free from noise is graded a miss; street noise or traffic was reported at about 29 million homes in 1999.

None of the farm forecasts came true in full. Oranges came from four states led by Florida, California and Arizona (Exhibit H). Field peas grown in trials from 1996 to 1998 weighed a fraction of a gram a seed, according to Poggio and colleagues (2005; Exhibit P).

Twenty items could not be scored. Two are too loosely worded to test: English as the most widely spoken language, which depends on how speakers are counted, and automobiles cheaper than horses, which depends on whether price, upkeep or wages are meant. The arrest of storekeepers who leave food exposed has no line between exposed and covered food, and item 21 on the coal supply is not yet due. For the other 16, among them apple-sized strawberries, wave power, cane sugar and a two-day Atlantic crossing, no source read here settles the test, so they are left out rather than scored as misses.

Why did 1900 want these things?

Some of the forecasts answer worries printed elsewhere in the same issue. A serial in the issue, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Successors of Mary the First, follows a suburban couple whose neighbors ride the commuter train and who cannot find a cook (Exhibit B, p. 13). Watkins’s page promised cheap trips from the suburbs and ready-cooked meals that would make a hired cook unnecessary.

Grades by topic. Drawn from the item table published with this page.

An advertisement for Tone Bros. spices in the same issue warns readers, “Don’t buy bulk spices,” and claims that they are over 66 percent adulteration (Exhibit B). Watkins’s forecast of arrests for food left open to the air answers the same worry. Because the issue itself shows these hopes and fears, these items fit the time-stamped wish. The other items are scored, and nothing more is read into them.