10 inventions predicted by science fiction writers

The talent of a real science fiction writer is not only to come up with an interesting plot, but also to literally foresee the future. Many things that the authors described in the past and even the century before last seemed incredible at that time, but for you and me they are everyday life.

It is all the more difficult to understand how these people could describe the Internet or the atomic bomb long before they were created. Today we will talk about 10 things, the appearance of which was predicted by famous science fiction writers.

10 Video Calls – Hugo Gernsbeck “Ralph 124C 41+” | 1911

There is now an opinion on the Internet that the advent of video calls was predicted by Robert Zemeckis in the second part of Back to the Future, but in fact it was done long before him. The name of this seer is Hugo Gernsback, and he did it over a century ago.

On the cover of his novel Ralph 124C 41+, he placed a device with which the heroine not only called, but could see the interlocutor during the conversation. For 1911, such a device was something out of the ordinary, but for you and me – nothing special.

9. Antidepressants – Aldous Huxley “Brave New World” | 1932

In his dystopia, Aldous Huxley describes a world in which people take mood-boosting pills – catfish. Now they are called antidepressants, but the essence of this does not change in any way.

In the 30s of the last century, the pharmaceutical industry was not developed so much, because only 4 years had passed since the discovery of penicillin, so readers could not even imagine that someday “catfish” would be sold in every pharmacy.

8. Credit Cards and Supermarkets – Edward Bellamy “Looking Back” | 1888

Credit cards and supermarkets are very close things, because cards are most often used just in supermarkets, so we put them together. Moreover, for the first time they are mentioned in one work. When Edward Bellamy wrote his novel, no one had any idea about such things, but they were real in the world he invented.

He described the year 2000, but technological progress outstripped his imagination, since the first credit cards appeared in 1962. However, it was in the XNUMXs that they became the most popular and began to crowd out cash, so to some extent he guessed right over time.

7. Headphones and Plasma TVs – Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 | 1953

Another “double” prediction comes from the pen of Ray Bradbury, who in his most famous novel described a world without books, but with incredible technology by the standards of the 50s.

The protagonist’s wife was obsessed with talk shows, which she watched on huge screens that acted as walls, and constantly wore “shells” in her ears – a prototype of modern in-ear headphones.

The first real devices were created only a quarter of a century later, and the author saw this as he lived until 2012. Unlike Gernsback or Bellamy, Bradbury personally watched his ideas become reality.

By the way, in the same novel, he described a device that strongly resembles modern ATMs.

6. E-book – Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | 1979

This idea of ​​the writer, although ahead of its time, was quite a bit ahead of its time: the prototype of the e-book was created in the mid-90s, and mass production began at the end of the decade. Adams told Neil Gaiman about his idea, with whom he closely communicated.

Gaiman, after listening to him, said that the appearance of such devices would be a death sentence for printed literature, but Adams disagreed. He set the example of sharks, which lived long before the dinosaurs, but despite the appearance of a more developed species, continued to exist even after their extinction.

As we can see, he turned out to be completely right: electronic books have become commonplace, but paper books have not disappeared from store shelves either.

5. Bionic Prostheses – Martin Caidin “Cyborg” | 1972

In his work, Martin Caidin describes a man whose limbs and even an eye were replaced with mechanical prostheses after an injury. Now this idea is still being exploited by science fiction writers (think of the films “I, Robot” or “RoboCop”), but real prostheses are also widespread. The first one was created more than 40 years after the book was published.

4. The Atomic Bomb – HG Wells “The World Set Free” | 1914

H. G. Wells can be called the person who predicted the most inventions: here is a video recorder, and a laser, and a slow cooker, and a flight to the moon, and dozens of other things.

We singled out the nuclear bomb only because it became the most terrible thing, the appearance of which he described in the pages of his books, although he could not imagine the full scale: the bombs he described had a negligible power compared to those invented by mankind.

3. 3D projector – Frank Herbert “Dune” | 1965

Three-dimensional projectors cannot be called everyday life, since the technology is still far from perfect and few can afford such a toy, but it still exists. And in 1965, when Herbert was writing his cult novel, such technology seemed unattainable, since then ordinary projectors had just come to the masses and no one had any idea about 3D.

2.

This author cannot be called a classic science fiction writer, as he tried himself in different genres, but when he took up the description of the world of the future, he got goosebumps reliably. In a short story in 1904, he described a teleelectroscope – a system with which people can exchange information and track the lives of others, even if they live in different cities and countries. Now we call it the Internet and social networks.

By the way, Twain also invented fingerprinting – in his book “Life on the Mississippi” they search for a criminal by fingerprints, although there were still 10 years before the official appearance of such a methodology.

1. Mobile phone – Alexander Belyaev “Struggle on the air” | 1927

It is not for nothing that the writer is called the “Russian Jules Verne”: he made a huge contribution to the development of not only domestic, but also world literature. The appearance of a mobile phone is considered his most famous “prophecy”, although in other works the author spoke about plastic surgery, foreseeing its development, about scuba gear and drones, and many more things that appeared after his death.