Rocket mail
Technology Predictions – Rocket mail
In 1959, there was an interesting prediction about how
we should be receiving our mail. US Postmaster
General Arthur Summerfield suggested that, before man
reached the Moon, mail would be delivered in mere
hours from one country to another country via missile.
“We are on the threshold of rocket mail,” he boldly
proclaimed.
This sounds like a cool idea and express mail has come a long way, but sadly we haven’t reached the dizzy
heights of rocket mail just yet!
Movable houses
Technology Predictions – Moveable houses
This adventurous prediction comes from science writer
Arthur C Clarke. Speaking in 1966, his theory was that,
come 2001, houses could be moved when their owners
felt it necessary. He also predicted that using movable
houses, whole communities could migrate south during
the winter, just like geese do. He said:
“Given a compact power source, the house of the future
would have no roots tying it to the ground. Gone would be
water pipes, drains, power lines; the autonomous home could therefore move, or be moved to anywhere on
Earth at the owner’s whim.”
Arthur C Clarke
Everyone will travel by horse
Technology Predictions – Everyone will travel by horse
Believe it or not, in the early 1900s, not everyone
thought that the invention of the car held water. The
President of the Michigan Savings Company in 1903
scoffed at the idea, claiming that “the horse is here to
stay, but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad”.
This prediction came about when he was advising
Horace Rackham, Henry Ford’s lawyer, not to invest
in the Ford Motor Company.
Well, horses certainly haven’t gone anywhere, but it’s safe to say cars are a much more reliable method of
getting from A to B and have proved themselves more than just a craze!
Internet Speed
Twenty years ago, the internet connection used was known as ‘dial-up’, which used a telephone line to
connect to the internet. This meant that you could only use either the phone line or the internet at one time,
sharply increasing the number of arguments in households with teenagers! Dial-up would take up to a
minute to connect and was characterised by a series of musical beeps, screeches and boings as the
modem connected. Needless to say dial-up was notoriously slow – 56kbit/s, which contrasts with UK
average speeds today of 22 Mbps. To put this into context – a 6MB image would take 15 minutes to
download on dial-up, but only 2 seconds today.
Today, we are able to access the internet completely wirelessly, from wherever we are. WiFi was
introduced in the early 2000s, but demand for it exploded when WiFi enabled phones hit the market around
2007 and consumers wanted public WiFi points for when we’re out and about. On our mobile phone
networks we also have internet access via 4G, and are slowly being introduced to 5G, which will only make
our access to the internet even faster.
The number of people who have access to an internet connection has also hugely increased in 20 years. In
2000, only 25% of all households in the UK had broadband access, yet in 2018 over 95% did!
Memory
There is a stark contrast between the data storage of 20 years ago, the storage available now. Twenty
years ago people were using floppy disks and Compact Disc Rewritables (CD-RW) to hold files such as
documents and photos, and although they were large in physical size, they didn’t hold much data. At the
beginning of the millennium, USBs had just been invented, which held around 8MB – enough for two
ebooks or a 90 second low-resolution video. Nowadays, we have USB-C drives, that can carry significantly
more information compared to USB drives and offer double the transfer speed, all whilst gradually getting
smaller in size.
SD (Secure Digital) cards are also commonplace today, they come in a variety of different sizes to suit your
different devices, from cards around the size of a stamp to ones the size of your fingernail! It’s also not
unusual to see SD cards today that hold over 250GB – which is a huge advancement from the 32, 64 or
128 MB cards available 20 years ago! This is the equivalent of being able to hold just ten 12 megapixel
photos on a 64MB card, whereas a 250GB card can hold around 30,000.
Over the last few years, we’ve gradually been moving away from storing information on physical devices as
cloud storage has become very popular. Cloud storage allows us to access data from anywhere that has an
internet connection, removing the need for us to carry around memory devices. Instead, our information is
stored on huge servers around the world, providing almost limitless capacity. This does, however, leave
your files at the mercy of other companies, so many people prefer to privately store them on memory
devices.
It’s evident that huge advancements have been made in the past two decades across all areas of the
technological world. It almost seems impossible to imagine what will happen in the next two!
