You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

[Lee Stewart]

[Lee Stewart]

From the television series Star Trek (1966-1969)

Martin Cooper, a mobile device designer at Motorola in the 1970s, made it quite clear that making a gadget inspired by the TV series Star Trek was more than a mere whim, it was the whole idea. The famous Communicator (why bother with a complicated name?) has since become that device we hold in our hands every day.

[Lee Stewart]

From the novel Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle, published in 1911

Jack Cover, a NASA physicist and creator of the first TASER in the 1970s, was inspired by the writings of Victor Appleton. TASER is, in fact, an acronym for Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle, a reference to the main character who uses the device in a series of over one hundred Victor Appleton novels published between 1910 and 1941.

[Lee Stewart]

In 1964, The New York Times commissioned Isaac Asimov, author of I, Robot, to imagine technology that would be featured at the World’s Fair 50 years in the future. Asimov envisioned automobiles equipped with “brains,” enabling them to drive themselves. He was only a few years off the mark. Autonomous vehicles, like Waymo, have now become reality.

[Lee Stewart]

In the TV series Star Trek, the smartly named Replicator created, upon demand, food and various useful objects for the crew of the starship NCC-1701. We're not quite there yet snack-wise, but we're definitely on our way. Back in 1983, Chuck Hull perfected a machine capable of creating objects using stereolithography. 3D printing is now available to anyone who can afford it.

[Lee Stewart]

From the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953

Ray Bradbury’s novel presents a society in which books are forbidden and technology is used to enslave the population. For example, Bradbury describes radios that broadcast “an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind,” specifically stating that the devices were worn inside the ear.

[Lee Stewart]

From the novel Robur the Conqueror, published in 1886

The Nautilus was not the only futuristic mode of transportation to emerge from Jules Verne’s imagination. A helicopter also shows up in his writing. The flying machine made a marked impression on one young reader named Igor Sikorsky, inspiring him to create his own version that took to the skies for the first time in 1939. Sikorsky loved to quote Verne, often saying, “anything that one man can imagine, another can make real.”

[Lee Stewart]

From the novel The War of the Worlds, first published in 1897 in Pearson’s Magazine and Cosmopolitan

American scientist Robert H. Goddard, creator of the first liquid-fueled rocket in March 1926, became fascinated by space flight after reading The War of the Worlds. The photo shows one of his rockets ready for a launch test on July 17, 1929. NASA administrator Charles Bolden honored Goddard and Verne's contribution to space exploration in 2016 as preparations for a mission to Mars were underway.

[Lee Stewart]

From the novel The World Set Free, published in 1914

In his 1914 novel, British author Herbert George Wells imagined that artificial atomic energy would be developed by 1933 and used in a devastating world war from which a peaceful global government would emerge. Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932 and resolved to find out how to liberate this atomic energy. The answer, a nuclear chain reaction, came to him suddenly in 1933. The novel also inspired him to advocate for arms control and the peaceful use of nuclear energy following the Second World War.

[Lee Stewart]

From the novel Looking Backward, published in 1888

Edward Bellamy’s novel takes place in a world where physical money no longer exists. Instead, characters make purchases using cards issued from a central bank. Not a bad hypothesis for 1888. The first universal credit card, Diners Club, actually appeared in 1950.