Alexander Graham Bell’s Remarkably Accurate Prediction About the Future

Alexander Graham Bell was known for inventing the first practical telephone for the world but he was not only an inventor. Not only did he predict the energy crisis that is present today, but he also suggested utilizing solar panels and biofuel as a solution.

Writing for National Geographic magazine in 1917, Bell made an astonishingly accurate forecast as to the overutilization of fossil fuels and ventured to guess that the earth would be transformed into a “hot-house”.

As Bell’s great-grandson Edwin S. Grosvenor mentioned in their biography, centuries ago a few scientists regarded air pollution as a global problem. However, this never crossed the mind of Bell as he proceeded to make his “hot-house” predictions.

In 1917, only a handful of scientists were aware of air pollution effects, and they thought that including more pollutants in the air would cause a cooling effect due to the obstruction of Sun rays, as mentioned by Bell in contrast.

Although we would be losing some of the Sun’s heat, Bell continued, “we could gain some of Earth’s heat which it radiates into space. ”

On balance, I think that we would have a greenhouse effect … The final result will likely become a hot-house condition from greenhouse.

However, it appears that English physicist John Henry Poynting was actually the first person to use the words ‘greenhouse effect’ of the atmosphere back in 1902 almost a decade before Bell.

Poynting was the first who used the term ‘greenhouse effect of the atmosphere’ as far back as in 1909 when he described air pollution as blanketting effect.

Jumping ahead to the year 1917, Bell received an invitation to address the graduating class of the future Hawthorne Elementary School, McKinley Manual Training School in Washington DC. In his speech, he pointed the various problems that were prevalent in the word at that time like that it was impossibility to have a warm bath at 2 am and that postage stamp could be used for transportation of people.

The speech was later given a print form for National Geographic magazine ; the same issue includes Bell’s discussion of the troubles that a society that went from candles to electricity overnight; Bell’s words on the subject of coal and oil concluding that humanity will continue to rely on them until they are gone seem to be equally prophetic.

Bell focused on the exhaustion of the sources as he stated that once the content of coal and oil was pumped from the ground those cannot be replaced. said the world was nearing the end of these non renewable resources and asked what would happen as the resources got depleted?

For instance, to advance the use of renewable energy, Bell championed the utilization of tidal as well as wave power, as well as direct harnessing of energy from the sun. Strategies and plans to harness and develop solar energy with a especial reference to the rooftop solar devices underlined his leadership and progressive thinking towards energy problem solving.

But first, to get to Bell’s slightly less accurate predictions, let us just acknowledge how pertinent the whole thing is.

But then we turn to Bell’s favourite form of alternative energy – alcohol, the “beautifully clean and efficient fuel”.

The world will probably depend upon alcohol more and more as time goes on, and a great field of usefulness is opening up for the engineer who will modify our machinery to enable alcohol to be used as the source of power.

From algae to bacteria, biofuels haven’t exactly set the world on fire, and despite major advances in ethanol fuel production, we’re still waiting for the results.

But let’s just say, if Alexander Graham Bell and Carl Sagan took some time out of zipping around the Universe as ghostly apparitions – just kidding – to see what 2017 actually looks like, they’d probably be equal parts bemused and horrified by how accurate their predictions were.