Mind Blowing Technology

[ckatt]

As real-world science moves forward, things that were once seen as fictional have become reality. Nowadays, when reading a classic piece of science fiction, many of the fantastical elements don’t seem so impressive anymore. Yet at the time written, they may have been emergent technology or complete imagination. I was reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 with some students recently and they were all flabbergasted when they made the connection that things in the book, such a miniaturized wireless communication device, did not exist at the time. I clearly remember one student saying, with raised eyebrows and a skeptical tone, "But, how did he know?" I'm wondering, what classic sci-fi books have you read that contained ideas or technology that were familiar to you in a contemporary setting and thus unremarkable, only to later learn that when the book was written such technology did not exist?

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

My favorite example is the story "A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster, which comes very close to describing personal computers in 1946.

A Logic Named Joe - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The story is particularly noteworthy as a prediction of massively networked personal computers and their drawbacks, written at a time when computing was in its infancy.

There's also "The Feeling of Power" (1958) by Isaac Asimov, which predicted how people would become dependent on electronic computing devices to do simple arithmetic.

The Feeling of Power - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Stable]

Not to take anything away from the accomplishments of these authors (especially Asimov, who seemed to have a knack for futurism), but I suppose we do end up with a field of stories chosen post-hoc. All the authors who predicted personalised fusion reactors and dome cities (or whatever) are weeded out by definition, leaving the rest looking spookily prescient.

Those are two amazing stories though Victoria. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Alex The G and T]

When I read these sorts of things in the '60s and 70's the concepts were still wild, wishful speculation.

Watching some of the concepts come true, over the decades, has been a delightful adventure.

Not all of it was fantastical dreaming. A lot of those authors were scientists, or knew scientists, or researched scientific journals for ideas; so they had prior knowledge of things which were in development before the general public had heard the news.

Notably, John Campbell, and Astounding Science Fiction Magazine were investigated, seriously, for publishing a speculative story that had far too many accurate details about how to build an atomic bomb; when the Manhattan Project was still super secret.

Deadline (science fiction story) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Alex The G and T]

Born in '57, I was kind of at the tail end of that post war period of rebuilding and reconstruction mentality. Boys were expected to be interesting in construction and science and engineering.

While the girls were playing with their dolls and toy kitchens; boys were given Train Sets and Chemistry Sets and Erector Sets.

Before TV; when radio shows were new, a kid could build his own radio receiver from a kit, or from scavenged parts. (When the Radio Shack store was clerked by knowledgable geeks who could help you pick out parts and tell you how to assemble them.)

My new Train Set came with a ton of extra parts that had belonged to my father, and grandfather. Likewise my shiny new Erector Set. A big box of steel girders, nuts and bolts, pulleys and motors. There was a booklet with some suggested projects; but the concept was to use the imagination, grok how things work and put something together that does something.

And don't get me started on Chemistry Sets.... Heheeheh. In those days, "Boys will be Boys" was still an acceptable defense for blowing something up.

 

[Danny McG]

And don't get me started on Chemistry Sets.... Heheeheh. In those days, "Boys will be Boys" was still an acceptable defense for blowing something up

Me and a pal staggered out my Dad's garden shed and were bent over vomiting, Dad charged in and dragged the flask etc outside so the thick red fumes could disperse. He then bent over vomiting as well.
He eventually blasted the set with his garden hose and gave us a telling off.
I don't know what we'd produced but there was a large bald patch in the grass that took about five years to regrow

 

[Vertigo]

Me and a pal staggered out my Dad's garden shed and were bent over vomiting, Dad charged in and dragged the flask etc outside so the thick red fumes could disperse. He then bent over vomiting as well.
He eventually blasted the set with his garden hose and gave us a telling off.
I don't know what we'd produced but there was a large bald patch in the grass that took about five years to regrow

I have a couple of memories of that sort of stuff. I remember one time mixing and heating various things you could get easily from the chemist in those days ('60s) and producing an horrendous gas that drove everyone out of the house. When I went back to school the following term and told my chemistry teacher what I'd brewed up he went off and studied it for a while and later told me I created a crude form of nerve gas!

Another great favourite and dead easy one was to dissolve iodine crystals in ammonia and then leave it to evaporate; the crystals left behind are a highly unstable explosive called, I think, nitrogen tri-iodide, the slightest touch and it goes off. Some of you may remember doing this in the chemistry lab and sprinkling the solution around the floor to dry out. Then as (hopefully) the teacher is wandering around teaching the class later he starts setting off sharp cracks as he walks around! We used to mix it up in pill bottles, leave it to dry in the sun and then shoot them with air rifles

 

[Parson]

i didn't have quite what @ckatt was asking for, but when I read Julies Verne I was always amazed at how prescient he was about how things like submarines and balloons would develop. I've always loved history so I probably was not as clueless as those kids in the original post.

 

[ckatt]

I guess I was more specifically looking for stories you read not realizing that what you were reading did not exist when written but does now. So at the time of reading it didn't seem amazing but actually was. It's not so much about authors predicting the future as it is about us not realizing they had because so much fantastic technology is a reality now.

 

[Bick]

I guess I was more specifically looking for stories you read not realizing that what you were reading did not exist when written but does now. So at the time of reading it didn't seem amazing but actually was. It's not so much about authors predicting the future as it is about us not realizing they had because so much fantastic technology is a reality now.

I don't think there are any examples of this for me. I'm old enough, and know enough science history, to know what wasn't around in prior decades. You're only likely to get examples of this from much younger readers, I'd have thought... not sure we have many of them here - we're predominantly middle aged and up; at least that's been my impression of Chronites.

 

[-K2-]

H.G. Wells often has folks debating for fun if he actually made a 'time machine.' Some of his work (written in the 1890's) speaks of future events, wars, weapons and so on that hint at things quite similar. What someone pointed out to me I always found fascinating was in 'War of the Worlds ~ 1897,' Wells describes one of the Martian's primary weapons like this:

"...in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light... it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam."

The atmosphere of Mars is 95.3% carbon-dioxide.

What he is describing is a CO2 laser. Coincidence?

Past that, I'm both constantly amazed and not. The generation before mine dreamed of things we have today (PC's, internet, VCR's, CD's, cell phones, GPS, etc.). However, I also realize from those fantasies of 'what if' by the older generation, subsequent generations take those ideas and say 'why not?' Then make it happen... That's really the amazing part. What if ideas everyone has. It's staggering what people accomplish to make dreams realities. That's constantly amazing to me. Not, in that I expect it.

K2

 

[Bick]

Continuing the slightly off-topic discussion of especially impressive imagination of future technologies...

I’ve been reading Heinlein’s Future History stories, and in ...We Also Walk Dogs, I was very impressed to read the following throw away line:
Grace Cormet’s telephone buzzed. She took it out of her pocket and said, “Yes?”.

This is the most accurate early example of a mobile phone in SF I can recall. The story was written in 1941. I know Heinlein strongly believed in using technological ideas in a very casual way to make them seem more real.

 

[Dave]

As a kid, I was impressed by the video-phones and conference calling in Thunderbirds. The first actual telephone we had was a party-line. It was a shared line and you had to wait for the other party to finish talking before you could even dial a number.

I was reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 with some students recently and they were all flabbergasted

I think Fahrenheit 451 is particularly prescient with the wall size TV screens and ear shells, very like iPods. However, it is unusual. Science Fiction is often just an extension of some present day change or an analogy to a present day problem. It isn't always prescient.

...I suppose we do end up with a field of stories chosen post-hoc. All the authors who predicted personalised fusion reactors and dome cities (or whatever) are weeded out by definition, leaving the rest looking spookily prescient.

I think there is a robot guard dog in Fahrenheit 451. No one says the book is rubbish because we use real dogs and not robots.

Another great favourite and dead easy one was to dissolve iodine crystals in ammonia and then leave it to evaporate; the crystals left behind are a highly unstable explosive called, I think, nitrogen tri-iodide, the slightest touch and it goes off. Some of you may remember doing this in the chemistry lab and sprinkling the solution around the floor to dry out.

There was some put on the top of the cupboards in the lab that used to just explode at random in the middle of lessons throughout the whole term.

 

[TomMazanec]

I tend to read old SF (say before WWII) and feel all triumphant because our technology is so far advanced beyond what is depicted.
Then I read more recent SF (like the Sixties) and get all depressed because technology is usually imagined as progressing faster than it really has.

 

[Parson]

It's also true that tech advancement is unpredictable. Today's satellite phone technology is close to equal Star Trek communicator level. Today's computers were not often foreseen before the 60's. But Rocket technology is not that much in advance of 1960. And anything like a reasonable drive for getting around the solar system, in months to say nothing of days, looks decades away. Sorta in between those is the flying car. Certain ones are available now, but nothing like envisioned.

 

[Vertigo]

It's also true that tech advancement is unpredictable. Today's satellite phone technology is close to equal Star Trek communicator level. Today's computers were not often foreseen before the 60's. But Rocket technology is not that much in advance of 1960. And anything like a reasonable drive for getting around the solar system, in months to say nothing of days, looks decades away. Sorta in between those is the flying car. Certain ones are available now, but nothing like envisioned.

It's quite strange really. A bit of a generalisation but as I see it we mostly failed to see the advances in existing technology like computers, radio technology, etc. and expected much bigger advances in things that needed completely new science/technology like rocket engines. We often failed to see how new technologies might be applied. So we had satellites but mostly didn't see them being used for navigation, we had radio but didn't see it being used as a telephone. Whilst the stuff that needed new science/technology seems to be more a heavily optimistic wish list; FTL space drives (or even just drives capable of getting us around the solar system quickly), memory recording, implants (though they are beginning to appear for assisting deaf/blind people), life extension etc.

So we seem to forecast massive steps forward in science and technology but not expect smaller (but very significant) increments in existing tech. There are obvious exceptions to this but even Gibson forecasting the internet was expecting people to be plugging into it with implants.

 

[Venusian Broon]

H.G. Wells often has folks debating for fun if he actually made a 'time machine.' Some of his work (written in the 1890's) speaks of future events, wars, weapons and so on that hint at things quite similar. What someone pointed out to me I always found fascinating was in 'War of the Worlds ~ 1897,' Wells describes one of the Martian's primary weapons like this:

"...in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light... it is certain that a beam of heat is the essence of the matter. Heat, and invisible, instead of visible, light. Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam."

The atmosphere of Mars is 95.3% carbon-dioxide.

What he is describing is a CO2 laser. Coincidence?

Past that, I'm both constantly amazed and not. The generation before mine dreamed of things we have today (PC's, internet, VCR's, CD's, cell phones, GPS, etc.). However, I also realize from those fantasies of 'what if' by the older generation, subsequent generations take those ideas and say 'why not?' Then make it happen... That's really the amazing part. What if ideas everyone has. It's staggering what people accomplish to make dreams realities. That's constantly amazing to me. Not, in that I expect it.

K2

It's clear - as in: he wrote this down - that he was thinking about Archimedes 'death ray' when he came up with this weapon. He just replaced the sun with 'tech'. Also he had no idea what the atmosphere of Mars was at the time. I think the prevail.ing scientific view was that Mars was an arid desert world. They couldn't measure what was in its atmosphere, not until 1965 when Mariner 4 actually got near Mars so it could make observations, so assuming it was breathable with Earth-like oxygen and nitrogen would have been just as valid, therefore making Mars a 'Barsoom'. So no, he is not describing a CO2 laser

Back on topic. Honestly, trying to think of a story that got it right...all I can think of is how wrong most the stories were! But the reason I think SF writers and futurists get things wrong isn't so much the sort of technology that they imagine might be about in the future, but what we as humans want to use technology for.

So to go back to the idea at the top - from Ray Bradury's Fahrenheit 451 about a "miniaturized wireless communication device". Well, actually walkie-talkies had been invented in 1937 and World War 2 saw huge advances in wireless tech, from radio to portable communication devices, and I'm sure someone with a degree of curiosity in technology and having grown up in the 1920s and 30s, perhaps seeing and operating these first devices, would have observed the trend in new technology becoming more efficient and smaller as time went on. So extrapolating that we would have such devices wouldn't have been too hard for those thinking about the future. However if he were to tell us that his characters used the device to mainly post thoughts and ideas, or to have an argument with a complete stranger about politics, I'd be impressed.

I think some authors, like PKD, get the tech wrong (or perhaps it is better to say that what the tech is isn't that important!), but what he does seem to get right quite a lot is what it does, or how a "real" society would want technology to be utilised, and that still resonants with us today.

 

[tinkerdan]

Star Trek invented flip-phones.

I'm just say'in.

Can't wait for those little gizmos we can attach to our shirts.

 

[Parson]

Star Trek invented flip-phones.

Granted, but Star Trek "flip-phones" in use were much more like our satellite phones than our cell phones which "used to" flip open. --- The new "folding phone" might bring back a new era of "flip-phones."

>>> Setting up a Satellite phone service on a primitive planet would be easier than what we think of with cell phones and their necessary ground based antennas and distributed phone service centers, until you have a fair group of permanent residents who use the service.

 

[tinkerdan]

Mine still flips open just fine.

Granted, but Star Trek "flip-phones" in use were much more like our satellite phones than our cell phones which "used to" flip open. --- The new "folding phone" might bring back a new era of "flip-phones."

They never left anywhere to have to come back.