Future Perfect

You hardly ever see the future perfect tense any more. I ran into an example the other day in a book I’m reading (Big Science—Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that launched the Military-Industrial Complex by Michael Hiltzik.) Ernest Lawrence invented the cyclotron, a device that the bigger you make it, the better it works. But to make it bigger, you need rich patrons, which he was good at getting money from. The device turned out to be instrumental in building the atomic bomb, and the rest is history, you could say. The LHC in Geneva is its direct descendant. His practice of obtaining large amounts of money and large teams of participants has led to about all of our current high-tech culture, from the space program to video games. Here’s the sentence, written by Ernest in a letter to his parents:

If the work should pan out the way I hope, it will be by all odds the most important thing I will have done.

There, at the end, we have a future perfect. Verbs deal in some way with time, and that’s how we name them, past, present, future. Other languages deal with time somewhat differently, but that’s a topic for another day. The genius of the perfect tenses in English is that they convey the idea of something happening over a stretch of time, and then ending. For example,

I have lived in this house all my life.

That’s present perfect; I lived for a period of time (all my life) until now, the present.

How about the past perfect? Something happened for a stretch of time, and ended in the past.

I had lived in that house until I got married. Then I lived in a mansion.

And the future perfect? Something happens for a stretch of time that ends in the future.

If I live another five years and don’t move out, I will have lived in this house for fifty years.

Keep your ears open—maybe you’ll catch an occasional future perfect.

And just for grins, here’s a picture of the first and third or so cyclotron. That’s Ernest on the right. Photo via google.