It’s hard to predict the future, but that certainly doesn’t stop people from trying.  With the benefit of hindsight (i.e. if you look back at past predictions for how the world is supposed to be now) these predictions tend to fall into three categories: laughably off-base, just plain wrong, or (very rarely) close to being on target.  A few years ago I visited the historical archives at Duke University which contain, in addition to lots of other items, the corporate records of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.  In 1967 the agency produced a report on what the world of the year 2000 would hold for the R.T. French Company (the mustard people) in terms of food and consumers.  Today I’ll look at four of the predictions, and Friday I’ll look at five more.*

Prediction: The 35 hour work week.  The report quotes a computer expert as predicting a standard 35.5 hour work week by 1980, and, in fact, lots of people thought businesses were going in that direction.  As it turns out, Americans are working longer hours today than they were in the 1960s, and the report hedges its bets on this topic.  It discusses the rubber industry in Akron, Ohio, which, during the Depression, went to a standard 6 hour work day, and kept that schedule into the 1960s.  While that’s a 30 hour work week for the factories, researchers who asked employees how they spent the extra time found that more than half of them got a second job, and some of them even picked up a second job at another rubber factory, which meant they worked 60 hours a week, with no overtime paid (since they were technically working two jobs, not one).

Prediction: The importance of the microwave oven.  Raytheon, the defense contractor that discovered radar technology could warm food as easily as it could track Russian fighter planes, was predicting a $500 microwave oven in 1967.  While the explosion of the microwave  market didn’t occur until about a decade later, the report’s authors clearly realized that this was going to be a big market, and one which required different sorts of food.  For example, while a microwave could cook meat the finished product didn’t look like grilled meat, so some coloring would be required for meat products.

Prediction: The combination freezer/microwave oven.  The housewife pushes few buttons, frozen food tumbles out of the freezer and into the oven, and the food is automatically cooked.  While I’ve seen washer/dryer combos that do this sort of thing, I’ve never seen it with a freezer/microwave oven.  It’s kind of like the refrigerators that track what’s inside and automatically order more food: while it sounds like a good idea, it’s just easier to use the old system of going to the store.

Prediction: Cities where food is delivered from the store through sterile pneumatic tubes “to eliminate wrappers that constitute much of today’s household waste.”  This is just such a goofy idea that it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could believe this sort of thing; I’m not even sure where to start criticizing this.  With no packaging, how exactly does food keep clean?  Pneumatic tubes use air to push or pull the food along; what happens with oddly-shaped foods like chicken drumsticks or frozen burritos?

*All information in this article is from the folder “French (R. T. French Co.),” Information Center Records Box 4 of 24, J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.