272 Miracles Ahead! 



and blow huge smoke rings skyward at several hundred miles 

 an hour. Industrial cities would lose their unsightly and dis- 

 agreeable blanket of smoke and soot; cleaning and painting 

 bills would be cut sharply, and living conditions would be 

 greatly improved. 



Fantastic? Yes? Impossible? Impossible is a strong word to 

 use. Perhaps all these predictions will not come true. Perhaps 

 all these will come true, and a score of others. We have not 

 rounded up all of them. 



Only the future will tell whether our prophets are right. 

 But, at any rate, they may join a company of distinguished 

 forecasters of "things to come": 



Seven hundred years ago Roger Bacon predicted a dozen 

 of the commonplaces of today which were fantastic impos- 

 sibilities then. In fact, they were so fantastic, and Bacon knew 

 so well the tenor of his times, that he saved his neck by put- 

 ting his predictions in a cipher. But recently, when the pre- 

 dictions were deciphered, we found he had envisioned the 

 microscope, the telescope, explosives, and incandescent lights. 



In 1887 Edward Bellamy, social philosopher, predicted the 

 radio when he described that a person "merely touched one 

 or two screws, and at once the room was filled with music." 



And Eratosthenes of Gyrene, eighteen hundred years before 

 the voyage of Columbus, predicted men should someday sail 

 beyond "the Gates of Hercules" and find the world was 

 round. 



