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When the City of Detroit Century Box time capsule was opened in 2000 it had letters with predictions such as:
“That prisoners instead of being conveyed to the several police stations in Automobile patrol wagons will be sent through pneumatic tubes, flying machines, or some similar process.”
— Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police Commission, Letter to William C. Maybury.

From Mayor Maybury’s letter to the future——

....
We communicate by telegraph and telephone over distances that at the opening of the nineteenth century were insurmountable. We travel at a rate not dreamed of then. The powers of electricity have been applied marvelously. and compressed air and other agencies are now undergoing promising experiment. We travel by railroad and steam power from Detroit to Chicago in less than eight hours, and to New York City by several routes in less than twenty hours. How much faster are you traveling? How much farther have you annihilated time and space, and what agencies are you employing to which we are strangers? We talk by long-distance telephone to the remotest cities in our own country, and with a fair degree of practical success. Are you talking to foreign lands and to the islands of the sea by the same method?

How correct our prophecies may be we know not, for we write them in doubt and yet in hopefulness. We write them in the fervent belief that you will stand upon a vantage ground of experience far higher and more resplendent than our own. We ask, therefore, for those who assume to prophesy, your kindliest consideration and judgment, especially when we assure you that these prophets are not without honor, even in their own country and in their own time.

The Mayor thought righteousness was important-—
Begging that you will accept for helpfulness all that tends to your information and good, and look most kindly upon these which may seem at your time to be at fault, I close this tribute.

May we be permitted to express one supreme hope — that whatever failures the coming century may have in the progress of things material, you may be conscious when the century is over that, as a nation, people, and city, you have grown in righteousness, for it is this that exalts a nation.