Was 'Mad Professor' Low the 20th Century's Nostradamus?

An eccentric English inventor dismissed as a crank 100 years ago is today being lauded as a far-sighted prophet after many of his predictions for life in 2025 proved accurate.

Dubbed the 'Mad Professor' - partly because he falsely claimed professorial status - Archibald Montgomery Low made 100 predictions for life in 2025 in his essay entitled 'The Future'. Many were laughed at, some with good reason, but a number of Low's forecasts were spookily accurate. 

At a time when coal was continuing its remarkable transformation of daily life, Low accurately foresaw the future harnessing of energy from wind and tides, which was developed in the post-1973 oil crisis world.

He also imagined 'moving sidewalks' being commonplace – a belief proven by the everyday sight of escalators and travelators, although the former had in fact been in operation in small numbers since 1892. 

In addition, Low correctly suggested that machines would replace humans in delivering "heavy and disagreeable work".

Having given the first demonstration in 1914 of what was to become television, dubbing it 'TeleVista', Low guessed that "home loudspeakers and TV" would replace newspapers in popularity.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Low also touched on the possibility of mobile phone technology by virtue of "automatic telephones", something that would have seemed beyond the imaginations of others living in 1925. 

However, the inventor did make some spectacularly bad calls, most notably his insistence that by 2025 we would all be wearing synthetic felt one-piece suits and hats. His idea of movie fans wearing special glasses in multiplexes allowing us to view films from a menu has also yet to come to fruition.

Finally, his idea that all workers would receive daily massages remains a pipedream.

Low's predictions were reported widely by newspapers of the day, but were merely one highlight of a remarkable life which included a series of his own inventions including powered rockets and the first ever powered drone. 

He was also the subject of several assassination attempts by Germany during the First World War, due to his work on potential weapons such as guided missiles.

In October 1914, shots were fired through the window of his laboratory and within days a German visitor had offered him a cigarette laced with strychnine chloride. This didn't stop Germany using Low's 1918 design for a rocket guidance system during World War Two two decades later. 

His private life was also scandalous for the times, with his divorce from wife Amy in 1936 on the grounds of adultery with two women making Low a regular in the gossip columns of the newspapers which he perhaps correctly predicted would wither on the vine. 

Low died in 1956, aged 67, before many of his extraordinarily prescient predictions came to pass. 

As we ponder upon the life of the Twentieth Century Nostradamus, perhaps some of the Mad Professor's most outlandish predictions were merely too early rather than crazy. May the population of 2125 follow their daily massage with a visit to the cinema wearing bespoke movie spectacles and synthetic felt onesies? Only time will tell.