Dozens of technologies we use every day were first described in science fiction, sometimes with startling precision. The most famous example is the communications satellite, predicted by Arthur C. Clarke in 1945, a full two decades before the first one reached orbit. But the list runs deep: submarines, atomic weapons, credit cards, video calls, cyberspace, and smartwatches all appeared in fiction before engineers built them.
Communications Satellites
In October 1945, Arthur C. Clarke published a technical paper in the British magazine Wireless World titled “Extra-terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?” In it, he calculated that a satellite placed in orbit at 42,000 km from Earth’s center would revolve once every 24 hours, effectively hovering over a fixed point on the equator. Three such satellites, spaced equally around the globe, could relay transmissions to every corner of the planet.
Clarke wasn’t writing vague fiction. He described receiving and transmitting equipment that “could act as a repeater to relay transmissions between any two points on the hemisphere beneath.” He argued that a true global broadcast service would be “indispensable in a world society,” since existing long-distance communication depended on the unreliable ionosphere.
In 1964, NASA’s Syncom 3 became the first geostationary satellite, relaying live coverage of the Tokyo Olympic Games to the United States in the first television transmission across the Pacific Ocean. Today, hundreds of satellites occupy what is sometimes called the Clarke Belt in his honor.
Electric Submarines
Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea described the Nautilus, a vessel that bore almost no resemblance to the crude, hand-cranked submarines of his era. Verne’s fictional sub was 70 meters long and 8 meters wide, built with a steel double hull designed to withstand extreme deep-sea pressure. It ran on electricity derived from sodium and mercury batteries, extracted oxygen from seawater, and recycled its own air supply.
Verne also described a feature that had never appeared in any real submarine: hydroplanes, inclined planes on the sides of the hull that could tilt to make the vessel dive or rise at controlled angles. Captain Nemo explains the system in the novel, noting that when the planes are parallel, the sub moves horizontally, and when slanted, it sinks or climbs diagonally. These features, from electric propulsion to hydroplanes to double hulls, became standard in submarine engineering over the following century.
Atomic Weapons
H.G. Wells coined the term “atomic bomb” in his 1914 novel The World Set Free, three decades before the Manhattan Project. Wells imagined a world where scientists had unlocked the energy inside uranium and thorium, writing that “a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic.” He envisioned a chain of discoveries that would make “every scrap of solid matter in the world an available reservoir of concentrated force.”
The book’s influence wasn’t purely literary. Leo Szilard, the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, had read The World Set Free and later credited it with shaping his thinking about what atomic energy could mean for both civilization and warfare.
Credit Cards
Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward is set in the year 2000 and describes a society where money has been entirely replaced by a system of “credit cards” that entitle each citizen to an equal share of the country’s annual economic output. The term and the basic concept, a card that replaces cash for purchasing goods, appeared 62 years before Diners’ Club issued the first real credit card in 1950. Bellamy’s version was more like a government-issued debit system than a revolving credit line, but the core idea of a portable, cashless payment instrument was remarkably forward-looking for the 1880s.
Cyberspace and the Internet
William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer gave the world the word “cyberspace” and described a global computer network visualized as a three-dimensional virtual space called “the matrix.” Users in Gibson’s world could jack directly into this network and navigate it as though it were a physical environment. The novel came out five years before Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web and a full decade before most people had ever been online.
Gibson’s vocabulary stuck. The prefix “cyber” entered mainstream language to describe virtually everything related to the internet, from cybersecurity to cybercrime. Gibson himself later reflected on how reality caught up, saying: “Cyberspace came here. It wasn’t a place we went to.”
Even earlier, Mark Twain imagined something in the same territory. In an 1898 short story titled “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” Twain described an electrical device called the telectroscope, connected to the global telephone network, that let users see and access information from anywhere in the world. The concept of machines that could transmit both images and information at a distance had been floating around since the invention of the telephone in 1876, but Twain’s version reads like an eerily casual description of browsing the web.
Video Calling
Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 novel Ralph 124C 41+ described the “Telephot,” a wall-mounted device that let people see each other in real time during phone conversations. The story’s protagonist, living in the year 2660, is connected by mistake to a young woman in Switzerland while calling from New York, making her acquaintance face to face through the screen. Gernsback described rooms lined with large Telephot screens and loudspeakers, with thousands of people watching a single broadcast simultaneously, each visible as a tiny face on the display.
That vision took nearly a century to become routine. Video calling existed in limited forms for decades, but it wasn’t until the combination of smartphones, fast internet, and apps like FaceTime and Zoom that the experience Gernsback imagined, casual visual conversation across vast distances, became something billions of people do without thinking about it.
Smartwatches
In 1946, the comic strip Dick Tracy introduced the two-way wrist radio, a device worn on the detective’s wrist that let him make and receive voice calls. It was pure fantasy at the time. Decades later, when Apple launched the Apple Watch and Samsung released its Galaxy Gear line, journalists and tech writers repeatedly pointed back to Dick Tracy’s wrist as the original prototype. The strip’s creator, Chester Gould, later upgraded the device to a two-way wrist TV, adding a video screen, which only made the comparison to modern smartwatches more precise.
Remote-Controlled Mechanical Arms
In 1942, Robert Heinlein published a short story about a physically disabled inventor named Waldo F. Jones who created mechanical hands he could operate remotely. When real remotely operated manipulator arms were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s, allowing workers to handle radioactive materials from a safe distance, engineers named them “waldos” after Heinlein’s character. The term stuck and is still used in industries ranging from nuclear power to surgical robotics.
Robotics and AI Ethics
Isaac Asimov didn’t predict a specific gadget, but he shaped how engineers think about an entire field. His Three Laws of Robotics, first published in 1942, established a framework for programming machines to prioritize human safety. The first law states that a robot may not injure a human being or allow a human to come to harm. The second requires obedience to human orders, unless they conflict with the first law. The third allows self-preservation, as long as it doesn’t violate the other two.
These laws were fictional, embedded in stories about robots navigating moral dilemmas. But they became a real reference point for AI researchers and computer engineers. Many engineers have used the three laws as a starting framework for thinking about how to program safe AI behavior, and robot ethics as an academic discipline has drawn heavily on Asimov’s ideas. Modern AI researchers generally agree the laws are too simplistic to govern real systems, but the fact that a set of fictional rules published in a 1942 short story continues to anchor serious engineering debates is itself a remarkable case of science fiction shaping science.