5 Great Technological Predictions That Came True

Remember that Professor Trelawney from Harry Potter movies? She used to predict the future by using that magical ball she had. The fact that no one currently has such a ball doesn’t mean we can’t make predictions about our future. We have examples of futurists who many decades ago, predicted the modern technologies we have today.

Being a futurist doesn’t simply mean that you predict a hundred things and one of them might come true. It involves analyzing the current environment thoroughly and then stating where possibly we could be leading.

Lets take a look at some notable people who didn’t just gave a thought, but presented the closest model to the technologies that we have among us today.

1) Arthur Charles Clarke

Prediction: iPad - in 1968

5 Great Technological Predictions That Came True

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was a British science fiction writer and inventor. His most famous writing was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick worked with him to complete the film version of the novel.

In the film, at a scene, also shown in the pic above, an astronaut can be seen reading a newspaper on something that suspiciously looks like an iPad. And that device was referred to as Newspad. This Newspad was able to scan and report a vast variety of things.

This was the first ever visualization of such an electronic pad that could be used to view documents and stuff. Maybe this film was where the Apple took the idea from as the concept has now been turned to reality and called as the Apple iPad.

2) John Elfreth Watkins Junior

Prediction: Television and Mobile Phone - in 1900

5 Great Technological Predictions That Came True

John was a civil engineer and became a curator at the Smithsonian Institute after having a serious accident. Being a curator, he published an article in the Ladies Home Journal that was titled “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”.

In the article, he predicted a lot of technologies that we have today. He mentioned the existence of “cameras” and screen” which will enable man to see around the world and television is what he meant by this. 

He also said that there will be wireless telephone which will enable people to communicate with people hundreds of miles away. People took it as a joke of course but he was damn right. Sadly, he died before he could actually see his predictions turning into reality.

3) Philco-Ford

Prediction: Email -  in 1967

5 Great Technological Predictions That Came True

Who could’ve ever thought about the e-mails before there was internet or even the computer? Well, that would be Philco Company which was later discontinued and bought by Ford. Philco was an electronics pioneer and eventually became one of the prime manufacturer of radios in his time.

The company made a short film titled “Year 1999 A.D.” in which a lot of future inventions were predicted. The most important of them was the concept of “instant communication between individuals anywhere in the world” which clearly points to the email service. Concepts like Online Shopping, online bill payment and online funds transfers were also shown in the 46 years old film.

4) Ray Kurzweil

Prediction: Almost all the technological advancements we have today

5 Great Technological Predictions That Came True

Ray Kurzweil is an American author, futurist and inventor. He is the mind behind the text reading software and speech recognition devices. Currently, Ray works as the Director of Engineering at Google Inc.

Ray didn’t just predict a thing or two and also just didn’t predict the thing. He predicted many developments and also the exact time when that will occur. He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union by 1991 and also the wireless technology by the early 21st Century. By 2012, 92 of the 108 predictions he had made turned out to be correct.

The interesting part is, he recently predicted the concept of immortality of human beings by the mid of this century. Coming from a person like Ray, this news clearly makes people believe they’ll be able to conquer death soon. Now let’s see how it turns out to be.

5) Apple Inc.

Prediction: Touch screen devices and Siri - in 1987

5 Great Technological Predictions That Came True

Apple Inc. is a multinational corporation, founded in 1976, that designs, develops and sells consumer electronics. Its major hardware products are the Mac Computers, iPod, iPad and the iPhone smartphone.

In 1987, Apple made a promotional video “Knowledge Navigator” that highlighted various future technologies. In the video, a professor is shown to be working on a tablet PC that had a touchscreen and a computerized assistant you could talk to. Later, he also has video conversation with his assistant.

Nobody before that could ever have visualized such technologies, which also appeared to be simply impossible to a few people. But that video laid the ideology behind the touchscreen smartphones that we have today.

You may like to read:



BloggingeHow | Making Blogging Simpler: 5 Great Technological Predictions That Came True
5 Great Technological Predictions That Came True
BloggingeHow | Making Blogging Simpler

Tools of the Trade