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- Submarine. Known as the father of the modern submarine, American inventor Simon Lake had been captivated by the idea of undersea travel and exploration ever since he read Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a boy.
- Helicopter. While Jules Verne is perhaps most famous for his fictional submarine, the Nautilus, the French author also envisioned the future of flight. Igor Sikorsky, inventor of the modern helicopter, was inspired by a Verne book, Clipper of the Clouds, which he had read as a young boy.
- Rocket. Robert H. Goddard, the American scientist who built the first liquid-fueled rocket—which he successfully launched on March 16, 1926—became fascinated with spaceflight after reading an 1898 newspaper serialization of H.G.
- Atomic Power. In 1914, H.G. Wells published a novel, The World Set Free, imagining the emergence of “artificial” atomic energy by 1933, followed by a devastating world war and the eventual emergence of a peaceful global government.
The list also excludes emerging technologies that are not widely available. The names of some modern inventions ( atomic bomb, credit card, robot, space station, oral contraceptive and borazon) exactly match their fictional predecessors. A few works correctly predicted the years when some technologies would emerge, such as the first sustained ...
- The Taser // Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle
- Helicopters // Jules Verne’s Robur The Conqueror
- The World Wide Web // Arthur C. Clarke’s “Dial F For Frankenstein”
- Humanoid Robots // Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy
- Liquid-Fueled Rockets // H.G. Wells’s The War of The Worlds
- Transparent Human Cells // H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man
- Invisible Material // Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in The Shell
- The Atomic Bomb // H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free
- Modern Submarines // Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
- Remote Manipulators // Robert Heinlein’s “Waldo”
Written under a pen name and published in 1911 by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (which also published theNancy Drew andHardy Boys novels), Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle sees thetitularcharacter invent a weapon that looks like an ordinary rifle but fires bolts of electricity. The book was a childhood favorite of Jack Cover and partly inspired the cre...
As a young boy, Igor Sikorsky read a Russian translation ofJules Verne’s 1886 book Robur the Conqueror, also known as The Clipper of the Clouds, and it fired his imagination. Sikorsky not only had Verne’s description of the helicopter, the Albatross, to stoke the flames of his passion, he also had illustrations by artist Leon Bennett, who worked fr...
WithoutArthur C. Clarke’s 1960s-era short story “Dial F for Frankenstein,” there might be no World Wide Web as we know it. The sci-fi story is about a global, interconnected telephone network that gains sentience—and it served as one of Tim Berners-Lee’s inspirations when he created the Web while working at CERN in the 1980s. In a 2002 Internet Soc...
Tomotaka Takahashi is one of the leading scientists working on humanoid robots, and for him, it all started with Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. The manga series, which initially ran from 1952 to 1968, follows the adventures of an android—the titular Astro Boy—created by Dr. Umataro Tenma. “When I was 4 or 5 years old, I read a comic book of Astro Boy an...
The father of rocketry, Robert H. Goddard, pinned his initial interest in making space travel a reality on reading 1898’s The War of the Worldswhen he was 16. In 1926, he launched the first liquid-fueled rocket, a momentous event in the history of space flight. Six years later he sent a letter [PDF] to War of the Worlds author H.G. Wells, in which ...
Scientists haven’t figured out how to make humans invisible yet, but it seems as though they are on their way—and that’s partly thanks to Wells’s 1897 novel The Invisible Man,in which a scientist makes himself invisible by creating chemicals that alter his skin’s refractive index to match that of the surrounding environment. Alon Gorodetsky, an ass...
Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell manga series, originally published between 1981 and 1991, features a technology called thermoptic camouflage, which renders its users near-invisible. Masahiko Inami, a professor at the University of Tokyo, read the manga while he was working on his Ph.D. and saidit made him realize that, while “it may not be pos...
In 1914’s The World Set Free,H.G. Wells predicted a city-destroying weapon, which he called anatomic bomb, that was small enough to be deployed from planes and “would continue to explode indefinitely.” His novel not only predicted the atomic bomb, it also inspired physicist Leo Szilard to help create it. Szilard read The World Set Free in 1932 and ...
In 1867, Jules Verne attended the Exposition Universelle and saw a model of the Plongeur, the first submarine to be propelled by mechanical power—via a compressed-air engine—rather than human power. Two years later, the author began publishing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a serial in Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation. The story featu...
Published under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald,Robert Heinlein’s short story “Waldo” is about a scientist named Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones who invents a device to help him manage his degenerative muscle disease. His machine can perfectly mimic his hand movements, but with greater strength and from a distance. This device is essentially a remote manip...
- Lorna Wallace
- Learning by plugging in (The Matrix) Author Malcolm Gladwell’s theory is that all successful people will have spent at least 10,000 hours practicing their skill, but who has time for that?
- Holodecks (Star Trek) Star Trek’s holodeck is a simulated reality facility in which objects and people are conjured up using a variety of futuristic technologies such as tractor beams and holograms.
- Invasion of dreams (Inception) The 2010 Oscar-winning blockbuster Inception featured Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, a thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets.
- Hoverboards (Back to the Future) We’ve wanted a hoverboard ever since we were kids and saw them in Back to the Future Part II and Part III, and it seems we’re not the only ones.
- The mobile phone. All About Space. From: "Star Trek: The Original Series" It's something that almost everyone has in their pockets. Mobile phones have become a necessity in modern life with a plethora of remarkable features.
- The universal translator. From: "Star Trek: The Original Series" While exploring space, characters such as Captain Kirk and Spock would come across alien life who spoke a different language.
- Teleportation. From: "Star Trek: The Original Series" The idea behind "beaming" someone up was that a person could be broken down into an energy form (dematerialization) and then converted back into matter at their destination (rematerialization).
- 3D holograms. From: "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope" Not long into the first Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi receives a holographic message. By definition, a hologram is a 3D image created from the interference of light beams from a laser onto a 2D surface, and can only be seen in one angle.
Oct 16, 2020 · Updated 6:22 AM EST, Thu November 5, 2020. Link Copied! Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi film, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was loaded with advanced tech that would ultimately become reality, including ...
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3. Warp Drives (Star Trek) According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, one of the pillars of modern physics, no object can travel faster than the speed of light. However, there’s nothing in that theory that places a limit space itself expanding or contracting at speeds greater than light.
