In the year 1922, James Windbreaker Klunck, then just beginning to establish his reputation as a futurologist, wrote down a list of predictions of the state of the world a century in the future. He deposited his list in a time capsule at his local F. W. Woolworth five-and-dime store, on the grounds that it was the one institution in the neighborhood that he could confidently assert would still be flourishing in the next century. The owner of the discount tattoo parlor now occupying the building has carefully preserved the box, and opened it yesterday to great fanfare. These were Dr. Klunck’s predictions for the world of 2022:

Governors, representatives, judges, etc., will be chosen by competitive examination, and the science of psychology will be so well understood that a list of five questions will be sufficient to select the President of the United States.

The various inferior disk systems will be abandoned once their impracticality becomes clear, and all sound recordings in 2022 will be issued on reliable and durable cylinders.

Pocket watches will run for more than 72 hours at one winding.

The science of eugenics will be so confidently understood, and so universally practiced, that all men will be named Alvin and all women will be named Alvina, and they will live to the age of 138.

Paper shortages will be a thing of the past, as books and newspapers will be printed on thin sheets of cheap and abundant mercury.

Education will no longer take up twelve or more years of a child’s life; instead, knowledge will be distributed in pill form, with the dosage regulated by careful psychological supervision.

Musical taste will be improved by the new educational methods, and jazz and ragtime will give way to the most artistic fugues.

Selective breeding and injections of certain vitamins will produce cats that come when you call them.

The design problems of inkwells will at last be solved, rendering them completely spillproof.

Prohibition of alcohol having succeeded in eliminating drunkenness, reformers will turn their attention to the lemonade menace.

No respectable business or government agency will invest in any projection or scheme without first soliciting the advice of a professional futurologist.