How an eccentric British inventor imagined 2025 a century ago

When Archibald Montgomery Low dreamed of the future, his visions were sometimes surprisingly accurate.

In 1925, the British engineer and inventor published a list of his predictions for the next 100 years, titled The Future.

In it, he envisioned a world in which stairs and sidewalks can move, sounds and images are broadcast into our homes through screens and speakers, programmable alarms wake people up in the morning, and women wear pants.

“He was a man ahead of his times for sure,” researcher Jen Baldwin told As It Happens guest host Peter Armstrong. “Some of his predictions were pretty much spot on.”

Baldwin is a research specialist at Findmypast, a British genealogy and history site with a vast collection of tens of millions of digitized newspapers. Ahead of the new year, the website dug through those press clippings and put together a list of some of Low’s predictions.

Some, like the aforementioned TVs, alarm clocks, escalators, and lady trousers, have already come to pass. Others, not so much.

For example, he imagined the people of the future would all wear one-piece felt suits and matching hats, and get daily morning massages via “radio light treatment.”

Movie theatres, he said, would air dozens of films on a single screen at once, and the audience would use special glasses to hone in on their viewing choices.

Of course, we still have a year to see if those predictions pan out.

Who was Archibald Montgomery Low?

Low was a consulting engineer, physicist and inventor who is often described as the “father of radio guidance systems” for his early research into drones and guided weapons, according to the New Mexico Museum of Space History.

According to several newspaper accounts of the time, his work in weaponry made him the target of two German assassination attempts in 1914.

While not exactly a household name today, Low was well-known in his time, Baldwin says, often giving lectures and newspaper interviews about his thoughts on everything from spiritualism to the noise levels of London’s tube trains.

Often dismissed by his fellow scholars, Baldwin says he was more interested in communicating to the average Joe. He wrote 40 books over the course of his life, some of them science fiction, and all of them aimed at a mass market.

“The academic audience didn’t particularly like him very much. He used the term ‘professor’ and applied it to himself, but he was never actually academically trained that way and never, never actually taught as a professor,” Baldwin said.

“That drew some negative connotations with other academics and his peers, but he was really focused on making science and technology really accessible to the masses.”

What did he predict?

According to various newspaper articles surfaced by Findmypast, Low predicted that the people of the future would hear the news at home over “a loudspeaker” and that a “television machine would replace the picture paper.”

Some experimental television technology existed in the 1920s, though it would be decades before it became a household item.

Low, himself, was a part of that progression. In 1914, he developed an early forerunner of what was to become television, which he called “TeleVista.” But before he could see it through, the First World War broke out.

“One of the things that he struggled with was actually finishing projects,” Baldwin said. “He would get to a prototype and then he would just kind of get excited by the next bright, shiny object to put it in kind of a modern term. And he never really got around to actually, like, you know, commercialising it or making it a financial success.”

He also predicted that by 2025, everyone would have “automatic telephones” that would “get the number right every time.”

“Wind and tide would be harnessed to the service of man,” he said, seemingly predicting the growing field of offshore wind energy.

He also said that by 2025, people would be “promptly” awakened each morning — at “probably nine-thirty” — by a “radio alarm clock.”

‘He just kind of falls off the radar’

Baldwin says she likes to imagine Low would thrive here in the future he so often thought about.

“I think at first he would probably be kind of astounded at something like the internet,” she said. “I think that that astoundment would only last for a second. He would dive in and see the opportunity of what technology offers us. I could imagine him as kind of a heavy contributor to Wikipedia.”

Despite being an eccentric press darling during his time, after his death in 1956, Baldwin says Low “just kind of falls off the radar.”

“People just kind of forget about him, right? And there are hundreds and hundreds of people like him that have these kinds of stories,” she said.

“Today we have the opportunity to kind of, at a click of a few buttons, just go into these historical records, these historical newspapers, and tell these stories and expose these stories. Anybody can do this. And that’s one of the best parts of it.”