Here is the list, via Kottke, and here. My favorites:
Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.
Prediction #23: Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons.
And strawberries will be as large as apples.
Well, isn’t the internet just a series of tubes?
Yeah, replace “pneumatic” with “electronic”, and they predicted the internet. Except it doesn’t deliver dinner (yet).
Regarding #3: Aren’t most healthy people able to walk ten miles? Was the ability to walk ten miles uncommon in 1900?
Well they was pretty accurate in the direction and thing that were accomplished,
- Better Health, Gymnastic in Public schools, faster and cheaper transport, better food, Worldwide news coverage in Newspapers and TV ( Color), Wireless phones, Air Conditioners..etc
Som were way off but was better than I expected…not so good on the means and technology used, but I doubt someone trying to predic 2107 today would be as good
Prediction 23 is absolutely true in the case of pizza and chinese food, not so much roast beef (at least in my city).
I would say the majority of the predictions are correct, and the rest laughable.
And some require reinterpretation by the standards of 1900. Eg. We have near zero flies these days, compared to a city where the streets are littered with horse dung. (Go to an Indian city if you don’t believe me.)
Didn’t Ted Stevens describe the internet as a series of tubes?
#19 “The piano will be capable of changing its tone from cheerful to sad.”
Wow… he predicted the modern keyboard instrument. Crazy!
It appears to be legit: I found this summary list on the url below. Scroll down to “v18″, item 8.
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/FMI/t588.htm#TOP
Did anybody else notice #13 “strawberries as large as apples?” Perhaps with enough nuclear radiation.
While the thrust of these predictions are generally correct (healthier, wealthier, generally everything in life got better), some of them are funny to read now.
Strawberries the size of apples ehh….
http://www.hydrotaste.com/farm_photos.html
As others have pointed out, many of these are surprisingly accurate (Huge points for predicting radiology!). I’m waiting for the post where you say that Robin Hanson’s great grandmother worked for the magazine
And that they arrived at the predictions in an illicit prediction market den 
I found peas as large as beets weirder than strawberries as large as apples. I can imagine wanting the latter.
Prediction #13 is exactly the same as prediction #26. Didn’t they have editors in 1900?
A friend at Yale sent me a pdf of the original. The sequence of predictions is different (which is perhaps why the reprint duplicates a prediction), but the text for each of the predictions is the same. It’s not a hoax, which was my first thought.
Strawberries now as large as apples then? I’ll buy that. There are some pretty large strawberries on the market now, and apples have been getting bigger in the past 107 years, too. Commercial apples then were more like the apples you get from people’s backyard apple trees, which are much smaller than most grocery-store apples.
Hmm. Maybe a selection bias? The list is interesting because it seems to get a lot of things right (for some value of “right”), but what about other lists compiled in 1900 that got things wrong, or, rather, wrong in uninteresting/unentertaining ways?
I rly lykd d #16: “There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.” Wht do u thnk? Snds lykly…
LOL. Well, it wasn’t that hard.
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“Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today.”
Yeah I totally agree with you on that point.
Rob
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