Thomas Alva Edison was spot-on about his predictions for the future

WASHINGTON - Late American scientist Thomas Alva Edison was dead right with most of his predictions for the future, which he had made in a 1911 interview.

Edison had predicted that electricity would displace steam as the power source for trains. In 2011 trains would be driven at an incredible speed by electricity generated by “hydraulic” wheels.

Air travel would be a regular feature in daily lives. With people preferring the swifter mode of transportation, many opt for it to breakfast in London, transact business in Paris and eat lunch in Cheapside.

Steel would become cheap and plentiful as a construction material. This would mean houses of the next century would be furnished from basement to attic with it, at a sixth of the present cost.

He had predicted an e-reader of sorts where “a book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes”.

He had also predicted that the value of gold will go down and that it will be as cheap as iron or steel.

“Gold has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel,” CBS News quoted him as having said in the interview with Miami Metropolis.

“We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in different proportions,” he had stated. (ANI)