“What is the most awesome technological development you can imagine being applied to our living rooms in the future? For the author of a February 1950 article in Popular Mechanics, the answer was: waterproofing. ‘When Jane Dobson cleans house, she simply turns the hose on everything,’ wrote Waldemar Kaempffert on how life would be in the year 2000. ‘Everything hefty would be made of plastic or other waterproof synthetics. Lighter things like tablecloths were to be mock-linen, woven from incinerator-ready paper yarn.'”
“Drying your freshly-hosed living room would be no problem. ‘After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything,’ reports Kaempffert. Housewives of the 1950s must have really hated feather dusters. (To his credit, Kaempffert predicted ‘shopping by picture phone’ in the same article.)”