Radar 1911
The evocation of radar in this passage is to Rabkin’s knowledge, the “one invention that ever appeared first in science fiction in adequate form and detail to count as a true prediction.” Guglielmo Marconi didn’t create a working device that could detect remote objects by signals until 1933.
Ralph 124c141 Hugo Gernsback:
A pulsating polarized ether wave, if directed on a metal object can be reflected in the same manner as a light ray is reflected from a bright surface… By manipulating the entire apparatus like a searchlight, waves would be sent over a large area. Sooner or later these waves would strike a space flyer. A small part of these waves would strike the metal body of the flyer, and these rays would be reflected back to the sending apparatus. Here they would fall on the Actinoscope, which records only the reflected waves, not direct ones.
…From the intensity and elapsed time of the reflected impulses, the distance between the earth and the flyer can then be accurately estimated.
The Escalator 1940
Although this is an often-cited example of a science fiction invention, the first escalator-like machine was actually patented in1892 nd the first moving walkway debuted at the World Colombian Exposition 1893. The road must roll by Robert Heinlin:
They glided down an electric staircase, and debouched on the walkway which bordered the north-bound five-mile-an-hour strip. “Have you ever ridden a conveyor strip before?” Gaines inquired. “It’s quite simple. Just remember to face against the motion of the strip as you get on.”
They threaded their way through homeward-bound throngs, passing from strip to strip…
After passing through three more wind screens located at the forty, sixty and eighty-mile-an-hour strips, respectively, they finally reached the maximum speed strip, the hundred mile and hour strip, which made the round trip, San Diego to Reno and back, in twelve hours.
Video Chat: 1911
AT&T started demonstrating its picture phone at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. The public was invited to place calls to a special exhibit at Disneyland. The first webcam was pointed at the coffe pot inthe Trojan Room of the Computer Science Department of Cambridge University.Skype as founded in 2003. Ralph 124c41+by Hugo Gernsback:
Stepping to the Telephot on the side of the wall, he pressed a group of buttons and in a few minutes the faceplate of the Telephot became luminous, revealing the face of a clean-shaven man about thirty, a pleasant but serious face.
As soon as he recognized the face of Ralph in his own Telephot, he smiled and said, “Hello, Ralph.” “Hello, Edward. I wanted to ask you if you could come over to the laboratory tomorrow morning. I have something unusually interesting to show you. Look!”
He stepped to one side of his instrument so that his friend could see the apparatus on the table about ten feet from the Telephot faceplate.
The cubicle 1909
We admit that most cubicles aren’t hexagonal and don’t come with armchairs, but still, those beehive-like, fluorescent-lit cubes where so many of us click away our days didn’t catch on until the late 1969. The machine stops by E.M. Forster:
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.
An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.
“I suppose I must see who it is”, she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.
“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.
But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:
“Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes — for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on ‘Music during the Australian Period.’”
The virtual Reality Games 1959
Considering that the first video game created until 1958, virtual reality games were a pretty far reach in 1956. The city and stars by Arthur C. Clarke:
Of all the thousands of forms of recreation in the city, these were the most popular. When you entered a saga, you were not merely a passive observer…You were an active participant and possessed—or seemed to possess—free will. The events and scenes which were the raw material of your adventures might have been prepared beforehand by forgotten artists, but there was enough flexibility to allow for wide variation. You could go into these phantom worlds with your friends, seeking the excitement that did not exist in Diaspar—and as long as the dream lasted there was no way in which it could be distinguished from reality.
Ipad 1968
We all giggled earlier this year when aplple anounce the iPAD.Some of us made jokes about certain Feminine productBut it looks like Arthur C. Clarke went down the the same naming route with the “newspad." 2001 space odyssey Arthur C. Clarke:
“When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug in his foolscap-size newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers…Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination…”
