The History of Predicting the Future

I am planning to start a document collection on the history of predicting the future. A great document for this collection would be an educated guess by scientists from the 18th century about, let’s say, the future of farming machinery. The thoughts of a layman from the early 19th century about humans one day going to the Moon would also be very interesting. While science fiction authors and their predictions are relevant, I am not planning to prioritize them, as that is already a well-studied topic.

There seems to be much fewer old documents that fit this category than I expected. Here is an explanation I came up with: the rate of progress (emphasis on technological progress, but also social progress) has been so low throughout human history that up until around the middle of 19th century, the life of one’s children were not that different than the life of one’s parents. In such a setting, one wouldn’t wonder much about how the future might look like – they already know! At some point, newer technologies kept coming at a rate that noticably changed everyday life (even within a single generation), which made people start wondering how things will look like in the future.

I am looking for documents that would be a good fit to such a collection. It would also be interesting to find existing projects that have considered a similar topic. If you, the reader of this article, know anything that might be of interest, please let me know.