This feature is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
“Canada will ultimately join the United States,” The New York Times quoted a London editor as saying in 1926. Though whether such a unification would be beneficial or disastrous, the editor said, “it is impossible to say.”
Similar articles from 100 years ago echo some of the same debates — and hopes — people have going into 2026. The next generation will heed the lessons of war and believe in peace. Some deadly diseases will come to an end. Economies can be prosperous indefinitely.
The year 1926 was full of predictions amid giant technological advancements and transformative cultural moments, so we took a deep dive into The Times’s archives to see what the future looked like a century ago, and what actually came to pass.
In addition to the debate about America expanding north (which hasn’t happened — yet), articles in The Times asked if perhaps jazz music was dying (it certainly was not — John Coltrane and Miles Davis, future icons of the art form, would both be born in 1926).
A scientist from M.I.T. predicted that a dire global food shortage would occur over the next century, positing that reindeer and caribou might become important sources of sustenance unless more efficient methods for food production and preservation were developed (luckily, they were).
A review of A.M. Low’s book “The Future” pointed out Low’s seemingly unserious yet revelatory prophecy regarding subways: “The seating in underground trains will be in the form of comfortable easy chairs, books will be within reach, and waiters will serve light refreshments while the latest news and pictures received from all parts of the world by wireless is flashed on to a screen.” (News on screens? Check. Still waiting for the light refreshments.)
Here’s what else the world was talking about 100 years ago.
The age of science
Radio on a screen: In December 1926 an engineer from General Electric told a gathering of electrical engineers that a wildly fantastic innovation was not centuries away as once imagined, but might actually be developed soon. Television — “moving pictures and images painted by beams of light,” as The Times put it — was no longer some far-off dream. Researchers were becoming more confident that they had everything they needed to create a technology in which pictures could move on a screen with sound. And scientists were predicting that along with television would eventually come the possibility of “seeing when telephoning.”
The promise of insulin: Four years after insulin therapy was introduced as a treatment for diabetes, and after much propaganda and misinformation emerged attacking it as a dangerous practice, doctors in 1926 were told that deaths from the disease had become rare for those getting proper treatment. “The tenure of life has been extended indefinitely,” Dr. John Ralston Williams announced to the Medical Society of the State of New York. A century later, more than eight million Americans with diabetes rely on daily insulin therapy.
A synthetic future: “The synthetic age is at hand and the day is not far distant when the world will be freed from the tyranny of raw materials,” The Times proclaimed in the summer of 1926. Copper, lead and tin were predicted to run out in a few decades, and atomic energy was still a distant solution to the world’s energy problems. But no panic was necessary, as scientists were finding that they could come up with synthetic solutions for absolutely anything society required, from replacing wood in construction to making rubber from petroleum. But one obstacle was troubling them: synthetic nutrition. “They refuse to predict that the time will come when mankind will swallow three pills a day as a substitute for three square meals,” The Times reported.
A cure for sleep: In September 1926 the chemical industrialist Irénée du Pont discussed the possibility that a synthetic drug could be developed that would eventually replace the need for sleep. Such a drug could “promptly neutralize the fatigue poisons which are at present destroyed only by the wasteful method of sleeping them off, at a cost of seven or eight hours out of the twenty-four,” The Times reported.
A soaring urban future
New York City: “I wouldn’t give five cents for the Woolworth Building,” Robert Reidt, the so-called “prophet of doom,” told a radio audience on Feb. 12, 1926, given that a ball of fire was about to come down from the heavens and consume New York City — or so Reidt had prophesied. Later in the year, somewhat rosier predictions for the city’s future followed in The Times, including an editorial that described the work of Thomas Adams, a pioneer of modern city planning. According to Adams, New York City and other cities of the future would be “more beautiful and comfortable and less congested than the great cities of today.” Adams predicted widespread suburbanization somewhat accurately, positing that in the coming decades new kinds of bucolic, leafy regions would spring up between American cities like New York City and Philadelphia, while “only industries which can be carried on economically on very high priced land,” like banking, would carry on in Manhattan.
Sky high: After plans for the world’s tallest building, the 108-story Larkin Tower in Midtown Manhattan, were announced in 1926, The Times reported on concerns about its construction and the downsides of building such a structure. Wouldn’t such a tall, congested building put an impossible strain on transportation systems? Wouldn’t getting to the top floors require “extensive and elaborate traveling,” not to mention colossal amounts of elevator cables and machinery? Should people even be building towers this high? In the end, the Larkin Tower never got out of the planning stages, while the Empire State Building, with 102 stories, would open five years later.
Edison, the contrarian: One person who had tired of American skyscraper mania by 1926 was Thomas Edison. According to The Times, the famous inventor told an interviewer in November that the building of skyscrapers would likely be “prohibited in the future” in congested areas of cities, because disastrous overcrowding caused by such tall buildings would eventually strangle traffic on the streets below.
To the skies
The dawn of the airline: By 1926 the early days of aviation were over, and a new era of worldwide commercial aviation had arrived. “Flying knows no frontiers,” an article in The New York Times Magazine proclaimed, and the United States, Europe, Russia, India and Australia were all feeling a bit closer thanks to airlines. Some seven years after the first daily express flight transported a pilot and two passengers between London and Paris, airlines in 1926 could carry up to 20 passengers on the route, and they didn’t even have to shout at each other in the cabin. New engines allowed passengers to converse in the air “with only a slight raising of the voice.” Flight, according to The Times, was modernizing so quickly that in the near future, ultramodern travelers would be able to circumvent the entire globe in “not more than 10 days.”
A plane in every garage: According to an article published in The Times in September 1926, advancements in aviation safety would one day make flying foolproof. So much so that “airplanes will be made so safe and at such a reasonable cost that the average man who owns an automobile will be able to buy a plane,” said an airplane manufacturer.
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