MARVELS OF TO-MORROW

Evening Star, Issue 19408, 17 November 1926, Page 9

MARVELS OF TO-MORROW

“ PRESS-THE-BUTTON ” HOUSES OF 1950. The day is not far distant, if indeed it has not already dawned, when the world will realise to the full the comfort and the power of the “ all-electric millenium ” (writes W. Leonard, in the ‘Weekly Post’). Scientists have been ceaselessly working ever since the beginning of the present century in a concerted endeavor to captivate, for once and all, the potent elixir that we call “ electricity!” It is estimated t’-at this wonderful era will begin its all-powerful way in the year of our Lord, 1950. Twenty-fohr years! So short a space of time that even men that are elderly now will live to see that care-free day when great cables will send_ the precious “’fluence” coursing into every factory, mansion, and cottage in Great Britain. Mother, then, will know no such tiring domestic duties as now; no squalling babies, no washing of clothes, no sewing, no ironing, and none of those many other household duties which go to make her life not so much an enjoyment as a drudgery. Baby, so often a trouble, will be rocked to sleep in an electric cradle, while the • housewife, freed _ from her sewing, washing, and ironing duties, calls hubby by wireless, and talks to him while seeing him through television. The domestic broom will everywhere give place to the vacuum cleaner and dust will disappear like magic to the great advantage of health and the suppression of infection. _ Even stairs may become obsolete in 1950, for even in the smallest of houses there will be sufficient energy to warrant the running of a small lift for general use. The span of the average life should take an unprecedented rise in the near future for the effective sterilisation of milk and water, and the total annihilation of the fly plague will drive yet another nail into the coffin of the high death rate. Soot, too, will have received its quietus ere twenty years have passed, for every home should by then be electrically heated and conducted. It may even be so that, in 1950, we will have farming by_ electricity. At any rate the hay will be made and stacked by electrical power, even as the poultry will be_ induced to lay in artificial sunlight—i.e., powerful arc lamps carefully concealed from view. Lighthouses, it is even now prophesied, will depart from existence, and wireless and “leader” cables will_ combine the task of guiding our ships and aircraft on their way. That all these wonders should happen in our time is a thought which our intelligence can hardly grasp, accustomed to such happenings as we are in this twentieth century of science. Nevertheless, it is true; the culmination of man s gigantic struggle with the potent power of the unseen element; the marvels of to-morrow!