Looking Forward from the Past In this activity, you will examine some predictions from the past. You will read documents and look at images that predicted the future at different times in the past and decide whether those predictions did or did not come true. Then, you will write short essays that analyze the sources and explain their conclusions.
Part A
Read these excerpts from three primary sources:

Source 1

This view of the future comes from John Wilkins (1614–1672), an English clergyman, naturalist, and writer, who helped found the Royal Society for Natural Knowledge in England:

Yet I do seriously and on good grounds affirm it possible to make a flying chariot in which a man may sit and give such a motion unto it as shall convey him through the air. And this perhaps might be made large enough to carry diverse men at the same time, together with food for their viaticum and commodities for traffic. It is not the bigness of anything in this kind that can hinder its motion, if the motive faculty be answerable thereunto. We see a great ship swims as well as a small cork, and an eagle flies in the air as well as a little gnat.
Source: John Wilkins from A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet, book 1, 1640