They Predicted The Inventions When we think of scientists and engineers, we give them a lot of credit for innovation and our advances in technology, and rightfully so, but there is another group of people, the idea people, who also deserve a lot of credit. Without them, we may not have advanced as much as we have and will in the future. They are the science fiction writers. Some truly incredible ideas have come from this group of authors which have contributed to some of the inventions we have today. Take Jules Verne for example. Here was a man who was born in 1828. He wrote the story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1899. One year after that the U.S. Navy built the first modern submarine the Holland VI. Verne’s idea of a submarine was far more advanced and resembled those subs used in World War II and beyond. Would modern submarines even had some of the features they have today if it wasn’t for the imagination of Verne? He died in 1905 and if he had lived longer who knows what he might have come up with. By the way 20,000 leagues is over 69,000 miles. He really had a great imagination. Challenger Deep is the deepest part of the ocean and is almost 7 miles deep. The diameter of the earth is almost 8,000 miles so even if the sub could go down 69,000 miles the earth is far from that depth. Sometimes people who weren’t writers had the foresight to predict accurately coming technology. A movie critic named Roger Ebert was interviewed by a magazine and he predicted accurately the advent of high definition televisions, being able to order the movies you wanted to see. Being involved in the entertainment industry, he and others might have discussed these things previously, but he was spot on. Apple was pretty good at predicting future advancements in technology. In 1987 they were predicting there would be touch screen products in our future. I have to be honest, some of these touch screens are more problematic than they are worth, and during the pandemic who wanted to touch buttons or touch screens to register a payment with their credit cards? I know I didn’t. They also predicted the voice assistants such as Siri among other devices. Arthur C. Clark, the great science fiction writer got a lot right. Unfortunately, when the movie A 2001 Space Odyssey was made Pan American Airlines was used which went out of business. Clark had said we would be able to communicate with the entire world in the future using screens and keyboards, and we all know he was right about that. Perhaps one of the greatest predictor of future devices was Leonardo Da Vinci. One thing we have to remember he based his predictions on what was available at the time to show them off. For example, he designed a helicopter type device which used a screw instead of a propeller and human power instead of an engine, but the idea was there. He predicted the parachute, the airplane, tank and scuba gear. When he died many believe he was building the first reflecting telescope. The writers of Star Trek are definitely responsible for some of the inventions we have today. Remember the communicator in the early television series? It was a flip phone, but with more range. Even the holodeck is becoming a sort of realization. Scientists have been talking about a new invention which would let a person feel a holographic object. While we are not as advanced yet as the holodeck, we are heading in that direction. Remember how the crew was able to use instant translation to talk to aliens? Today we have it on many of our phones. Some of the blind are getting a device known as eSight 3 to help them see again. This is sort of like La Forge’s visor. We are headed to cloaking with some of the materials we have discovered which bend light. While this is in the visual range, we still have a ways to go to completely hide from radar. A lot of work is going into trying to build a transporter and we are just beginning, but it seems some time in the future we may become successful. In 1869 a short story by Edward Everett Hale named The Brick Moon appeared. Interestingly it was about a space station. The method to launch it was a huge fly wheel. Today we not only have space stations, but there is experimentation in launches going on which use giant magnets instead of rockets. A lady named Mary Bradley Lane wrote a story named Mizora in which lab grown meat was being used. We have lived to see this becoming a reality. Ray Bradbury was a great science fiction writer. In 1953 he wrote Fahrenheit 451 and in it he spoke about portable radios. It was almost a year later when a tiny portable with an earphone appeared. There had been portable radios before, but they were much bigger. When Martin Caidin wrote his novel Cyborg in 1972, I bet he never believed much of it would come true. It was about Steve Austin who suffered a terrible accident when his plane went out of control and his entire body had to be rebuilt using technology instead of muscle and bone. That was the basis for the Six Million Dollar Man on television. Today mechanical and electrical parts for human bodies are becoming more commonplace every day.
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