A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

In 1905, a British writer looked forward one hundred years and saw paradise. This is that vision, preserved like an insect in amber. T. Baron Russell surveyed the railways, telegraphs, and electric lights of his Edwardian moment and extrapolated a future where technology and morality evolved together in perfect harmony. War would become unthinkable. Population would stabilize. Domestic life would transform through machines that anticipated today's smart homes. Russell believed material progress and ethical development were inextricable, that the century's innovations would produce a wiser, gentler humanity. What makes this book compelling now is knowing what actually came next. The Great War, the atomic bomb, industrial genocide, environmental catastrophe all intervened between Russell's optimism and our present. Yet there's something moving about this earnest Victorian faith that progress in steel and electricity meant progress in the human soul. It's a time capsule of confidence before the twentieth century's disillusionments, a document that reveals as much about the hopes of 1905 as any predictions about 2005.