In 2023, workdays will be four hours long. A century ago, in 1923, this is how they imagined the year that had just begun. No more hard work, no more effort. The prediction could not have been more wrong.

A series of tweets posted by University of Calgary researcher and lecturer Paul Ferry has gone viral in recent hours. Floss meticulously compiles a list of predictions for 2023, which have appeared in newspapers and other publications. Reading these texts is interesting and shocking at the same time.

The first decade of the 21st century was seen as a heavenly time. Faire reports, among other things, the predictions of the mathematician and engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz, according to which the year 2023 will be marked by positive social transformations: Every city will be pure and immaculate. He was convinced that pollution and garbage would no longer be a problem thanks to the miracles of electricity. That the world would continue to be marked by wars, famines, and epidemics was not a hypothesis to be taken into account. More than an expectation, it was a wish at a time when wars and dictatorships were a nightmare to live with.

List of predictions in 1923 around the year 2023

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– Paul Ferry (@paulisci) January 1, 2023

Men and women’s view of the future that was imagined a century ago is more nuanced. The editors of the Georgia-based Savannah News got a little closer: Women will shave their heads! On the other hand, men wear curly hair. Then unmarried women will blacken their teeth.

The most curious prediction concerns radio: according to the Minneapolis Journal, radio frequencies have replaced gasoline as fuel for cars. Including airplanes.

Then: Everyone in 2023 will be beautiful. Beauty contests no longer have to be invented because it will become impossible to choose a winner. Clarification: there will be no need to organize competitions for children either.

In 2023 the average lifespan will be lengthening: that’s how they hoped a hundred years ago. They had an overconfidence in the possibilities of science, and life expectancy hovered around 300 years.

Another wrong prediction? one on Canada. They wrote that it would have a population of 100 million: today they are just over 38 million.