Oldspeak—the language of the future?

With this article the series moves on to a two-part examination of the many factors—military, political, technological—that encouraged the new communications industry of the late 19th century to promote the forecasting of future developments. A large part of this publishing was taken up with the popular stories of ‘the next great war’. Their visions of limited and fast-moving wars could not hope to anticipate the shapes of wars-to-come, because they were written in the old language of uniform progress and were grounded in assumptions that advances in the military technologies would speed up the conduct of warfare.