Video Conferencing, Smartphones and Tablets: Visions of the Future That Came True
By Izzy Evans
Though Nostradamus is probably the most famous figure associated with making predictions about the future, thousands of people every year make guesses or approximations about what the future will hold. These predictions are particularly prevalent in science fiction but were also made by normal, everyday people. There are a number of visions or predictions of the future that are eerily spot-on. This is, however, only to be expected. With such a huge amount of people making predictions about our future society, a few of them, statistically, have to be right. Though these visions of the future are not quite as incredible as you may think, it is still interesting to see how people envisioned the future and to think in turn about what our future may hold.
Today's earphones are usually overlooked as a form of modern technology, but headphones were invented in 1910 and production for the general public only began in 1930. By the 1950s they were still large and overly bulky. The author Ray Bradbury predicted technology beyond this that was remarkably similar to the earphones we have today. He is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451, and though the book-burning future of American society he imagined does not parallel our society, his description of 'little seashells' mirrors our in-ear headphones. Bradbury wrote "And in her ears the little seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk".
In today's internet based world, you can easily find a video conferencing provider that will quickly and effortlessly allow you to video chat or conference. Families and friends can use the technology to keep in contact and share events in their lives, while businesses utilise video conferencing for meetings and interviews. One of the earliest accounts of video conferencing appears in a novel published in 1911, over fifty years before the first video phone appeared in 1964. Hugo Gernsback's novel Ralph 124C 41+ features a number of predictions about the future, these include the use of solar energy, radar and spaceflight. It also describes a form of technology remarkably similar to our own video conferencing services. Gernsback describes a 'Telephot' that when buttons are pressed '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 recognised the face of Ralph in his own Telephot, he smiled and said, "Hello Ralph".'
Tablet PCs are still a relatively new technology for us, having only caught the interest of the general public in the past two years. Despite the fact that tablets can still be considered an emerging technology, science fiction writers were describing something very similar as long as forty years ago. The most prominent example of this is in Arthur C. Clarke's book 2001: A Space Odyssey published in 1968 (although it was adapted from an even earlier short story of Clarke's called The Sentinel, written in 1948). The book describes a 'foolscap-size newspad' that can be plugged into 'the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth'.
Though Clarke's newspad is similar in some aspects to the smartphones and mobile phones of today, predictions for portable telephones can be found much earlier in the 20th century. The civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions in 1900 about life in the year 2000. He wrote that 'wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world' and described how talking to China would be as easy as talking to New York from Brooklyn. Thomas Edison's predictions about the future eleven years later in 1911 were slightly closer to today's smartphones. He said that telephones would 'shout out proper names, or whisper the quotations from the drug market' - something easily accomplished by today's mobile phone technology.
Some predictions about the future made in films only twenty or ten years ago have already come to fruition. The second Back to the Future film, made in 1989, envisions life in 2015, three years from now. The time travelling Marty McFly demonstrates his skills on a 'retro' video game only to be told by watching youngsters that having to use your hands to play a game is so uncool. Handless video games began to appear more prominently only a few years ago with the Nintendo Wii. The Kinect for Xbox is an even better example, as it uses a motion sensor to capture the player's movements.
Some films were not even making predictions about the future and yet foreshadow today's society rather unnervingly. The 1998 film The Truman Show is about the protagonist's whole life being broadcast as a TV show. A concept that was thought strange and unlikely now can be found on most television channels with fame-hungry pseudo-celebrities broadcasting the details of their lives. Interestingly the idea of 'reality shows' can be again found in science fiction. Robert Sheckley's 1958 short story The Prize of Peril has a protagonist who has found fame through participating in 'thrill shows'. It will be even more interesting to look back in twenty or thirty years to see which of today's novels and film have predicted our future correctly.
© Izzy Evans 2012
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