Hurricane-proof houses that pivot on foundations like spinning tops in slow motion. Human hibernation. Programmed dreams. Sky fishing. Robots cheerfully performing all sorts of chores - including one called Elektro, who smokes.

Just a sample of the exotic forecasts about how life would be lived by the year 2000?

Well, 2000's almost here and, as science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, "The future isn't what it used to be."

None of this seemed so far-fetched at the beginning of this century, when the world seemed to be tripping over itself with progress. People were learning to drive, listening to radio, talking into telephones, taking vacations.

The Wright brothers made their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 - two years after Wilbur Wright told his brother, Orville, that humans wouldn't fly for 50 years. "Ever since," he said later, "I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions."

Harper's Weekly might have heeded his advice.

"The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect," it suggested in 1902. By 1925, cars were zipping along New York's Bronx River Parkway - the country's first true highway.

So it wasn't such a leap of faith to envision a tinman mixing martinis in the waterproof living room.

Nowhere was the world more wishful than at the 1939 New York's World's Fair. There no home was to be complete without a Westinghouse Elektro, a singing, dancing 10-foot robot, that looked like a cousin of the Wizard of Oz's tinman (the movie was released the same year) and had just as much heart. In addition to sweeping the house clean, Elektro could count on its mechanical fingers, play with its mechanical dog, Sparko, and even smoke cigarettes.

It wasn't a stretch to believe in a technological utopia in which the drudgery of life would be eliminated and the biggest social problem would be what to do with all the leisure time.

Amazing Stories magazine suggested in 1946 that future hedonists could while away the time floating across the landscape in "pleasure bubbles."

"People looked around at what was happening and really believed that because they saw single-family cars in their lifetime, they would see single-family airplanes too," says Brian Horrigan, co-author of "Yesterday's Tomorrows," which explores the future as Americans predicted it would be.

The biggest miscalculation, Horrigan says, was the notion of a world of infinite luxury and leisure. Today, people feel more hurried and harried than ever. They don't believe in robots anymore. But oh how rosy the world looked when they did.

Consider some of the forecasts about what we would wake up to in the year 2000:

Winston Churchill predicted, among other things, the growing of animal parts for supper.

"We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately, under a suitable medium," he wrote. His 1932 article for Mechanics Illustrated was titled "Fifty Years Hence."

Futurist Herman Kahn predicted human hibernation for months at a time (presumably while robots were doing all the work) and programmed dreams. For those who woke up, artificial moons would illuminate the night.

Underwater colonies, machines "slaved" to humans and interplanetary travel were also among predictions in his 1967 book, "The Year 2000." The benefits of such wonders were left to the imagination.

Space travel and weather control were big hits with early 20th century seers. Another favorite was nuclear energy.

In 1955, President Eisenhower's special assistant, Harold Stassen, predicted nuclear power would lead to a world where "hunger is unknown ... where food never rots and crops never spoil ... a world where no one stokes a furnace or curses the smog, where the air is everywhere as fresh as on a mountain top and the breeze from a factory as sweet as from a rose."

Amid these visions of utopia, it proved harder to predict things that actually shaped the world we live in, said William Sherden, author of "The Fortune Sellers: the big business of buying and selling predictions."

The computer. The laser. The telephone. All were more or less accidents, stumbled upon in the course of other research, never predicted in their own right.

Not even science fiction writers, with all their visions of space colonies and Jetson-like spacecrafts, ever dreamed of cyberspace.

The computer was probably the most unpredicted phenomenon of the 20th century. Even after it was invented in the late 1940s, experts couldn't see a need for more than a handful of the clunky machines good mainly for processing insurance claims.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," Thomas Watson is reported to have said in 1943. At the time, he was chairman of IBM.

The telephone, a group of British experts clucked, "may be appropriate for our American cousins, but not here, because we have an adequate supply of messenger boys."

Sixty years ago, on leaving the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the World's Fair, visitors were handed a small metal pin, a memento of the fabulous world they had just glimpsed.

"I have seen the future," it read.

Now those souvenirs of the future can be picked up in junk stores - souvenirs of the past.

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