INVENTIONS OF THE FUTURE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 968, 18 March 1911, Page 4

INVENTIONS OF THE FUTURE.

Thomas A. Edison, in an interview published in the February number of the Cosmopolitan Magazine, makes some remarkable predictions of new inventions that will be given to the world before the end of the present century. Mr Edison predicts the time is not far distant when inventors will have made possible the following : Cloth, buttons, thread, tissuepaper, and pasteboard will be fed into one end of a machine, and suits of clothing, packed in boxes, will come out of the other. Steel will replace wood for making furniture. The cost of steel furniture is only one-fifth that of wood, and steel furniture is very light, because so little of the steel is required. It can be stained in perfect imitation of any wood colour. Nickel will be used instead of paper for books. A sheet of nickel one twenty-thousandth of an inch thick is cheaper, tougher, and more flexible than an ordinary sheet of book paper. It also will absorb printer’s ink. A nickel book two inches thick would contain 40,000 pages. It would weigh only a pound, and the cost of the nickel pages would be ss. Huge farming implements driven by electricity will replace the present agricultural tools. The future farmer will be a soil chemist, a botanist, and an economist. He will perform his present manual work at a seat beside a push-button and some levers. The most interesting of Mr Edison’s predictions is that the old dream of transmutation of metals is certain to come true sooner or later, and a way will be found to manufacture gold. The probability that the way to manufacture gold will be discovered sooner or later causes Mr Edison to believe the present financial system of the world will be changed. The time is coming, he thinks, when nobody will accept gold in payment for work, and no nation will issue gold as money, because anyone will be able to manufacture it.