Casts Horoscope of 1903

Space and Time Will be Annihilated

Draft Horses Will
Disappear and

Steam Engines Will be Back Numbers

Thus reads the headlines of the Jan. 8, 1903 issue of my hometown weekly newspaper, the Saratoga Sun. The following is the news item. 

Thomas A. Edison, the great inventor and “wizard of Menlo Park,” in a statement made in New York on Dec. 31, said the coming year would practically annihilate space and time so far as communication between the people of the earth was concerned.

“I look for a wonderful year,” said the wizard as he surveyed his surroundings. “There is more activity in science than there has ever been before, more men are working on big projects and great discoveries would be only natural.”

“I expect to see electricity supplant steam as a motive power. In 15 years, electricity will be the railway motive power – 1903 will advance it in that direction.”

“Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease.”

“Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows up all the more convincingly that we have been wrong, and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.”

“They may even discover the germ of old age. I don’t predict it, but it might be by the sacrifice of animal life [that] human life could be prolonged.”

“For myself, my storage battery, on which I have worked for four years, will be put on the market in January. It solves the traction problem, and its introduction means that the horse will have to go.”

“The wireless telegraph I assuredly expect to see perfected for commercial purposes – if not fully so in 1903, at least advanced toward that end.”

“I expect to give up practical invention for two years. I am going to experiment – going to delve in some problems that I have put by for an idle time – and for once I am going to work without having the production of a commercial commodity in view. I am going into the by-ways of science. I prefer not to say what my experiments will be.”

“Yes, trying to get electricity direct from coal is one of them.”

“The newspapers are among the great agents that will grow better in 1903, and in the years to come. They are the great school. They are getting better, they are printing more science and paying more attention to the things that benefit and improve humanity.”

“There will be few more wars. The world seems to be tending towards peace.”

This week’s illustration and greeting were swiped from the internet.