Twentieth Century Inventions

by George Sutherland

Reproduction of the original: Twentieth Century Inventions by George Sutherland

140 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

George Sutherland (1855-1905), a writer, was born in Scotland. He was taken to Australia in 1864 and graduated from the University of Melbourne. After teaching for some time he took up journalism and worked for the South Australian Register from 1881 to 1902, after which he joined the Melbourne Age. His works include: Tales of the Goldfields (1880), Australia; or, England in the South (1886), The South Australian Company (1898) and Twentieth Century Inventions (1901). With his brother, Alexander Sutherland, he wrote The History of Australia and New Zealand from 1606 to 1890 (1894), which attained a sale of 120,000 copies.

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating read. The author has incredible foresight on hybrid cars, wind farms, cheap fruit, and suburban sprawl. In an offhanded mention, he even gives a pretty accurate prediction of magnetic audiotape. He is also entertainingly wrong about some things. Aircraft? Silly idea that too many people are wasting time on. His inaccuracy is at times heartbreaking too. He's positive that electricity from waterfalls and windmills will quickly replace coal, and that collectivism is the only way of the future.

[Matthew Hubbard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only found out about it because H.G. Wells referenced it on his 1901 book Anticipations. if everyone who read Anticipations had read Twentieth Century Inventions instead and vice versa, this world would have been a much better place.

If you are technical, I advise starting reading at CHAPTER X: ELECTRIC MESSAGES, ETC. Recall as you read it that telephones are still luxuries and radio, which Sutherland calls "wireless telegraphy", has not shown that it can carry sound with fairly high fidelity, though not acceptable by our standards. Sutherland proposes several inventions that could have been done in the first decade of 20th Century that did not get made until much later.

The great Polish/British mathematician Jacob Bronowski defined a genius as someone who had at least two great ideas. (He uses this definition on his TV show The Ascent of Man to argue that his friend John Von Neumann is a genius, a statement with which any mathematician would readily agree.) Just in Chapter X alone, Sutherland shows himself to be a genius many times over.

Here is the link. If you are interested in technology and its history, this book is well worth your time.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31243

[Timothy Ferguson · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a novel in this somewhere

The author gets a great deal wrong, to be sure, and is so racist it makes his predictions gibberish on military matters, but his complete failure to understand the importance of petrol gives his work a lovely steampunk feel. Often he gets within striking distance of being correct about a machine, only to fly down some bizarre side alley.

Seriously racist, though. Past just being pro-British racist (as many writers were in his era) and out the other side as delusional as to how real people act.