E.M. Forster: The Machine Stops

I'm at the beginning of this short story, which was written in 1909. It's about a world in which people live in a safe, enclosed bubble and communicate, listen to music, do whatever they want - at the touch of a button.

The CPSIA bill made me wonder aloud with Tim how far the government intends to go in creating a safe environment for children - will it end by children being raised in hermetically sealed padded rooms? (Of course, the padding would need to be phthalate-free . . .) After all, even the world itself is made of dirt, and who knows how much lead might be in dirt.

And Tim said it reminded him of a short story he had to read for AO. It's here; I've only just started it. But I'm finding it eerily possible of the direction we could be going in:

"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs . . . she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world. "

"Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking?"

I wonder what, in 1909, could have given anyone the idea that this kind of thing could ever be possible, even in the imagination?