History is filled with thinkers, visionaries, and innovators whose ideas were initially dismissed as absurd, indefensible, or downright bizarre. But time tends to turn fiction into reality.
Many ideas that were once relegated to the shelves of science fiction novels or the writings of crazies now form an indelible part of our way of life. Here are 12 former ideas that were once peculiar but have somehow become a reality.
These stories not only demonstrate the power of human foresight but also challenge us to keep an open mind about what the future might hold.
The “Telectroscope” (Television)
In the 1870s, when electronic television was still several decades away from being invented, authors and artists envisioned a device that would transmit live pictures over wires.
It was often called a “telectroscope” and made appearances in science fiction and satirical cartoons, where people watched distant operas or sporting events from the comfort of their own homes.
French illustrator Albert Robida envisioned elaborate drawings of this future, which many considered pure fantasy at the time. But within a couple of decades, men like John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth turned this odd idea into the television that is in nearly every home today.
Traveling to the Moon
Since ancient times, the idea of traveling to the moon was considered the realm of imagination and fantasy, explored by storytellers rather than scientists. Already in the 2nd century, the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata had a story about being catapulted to the moon in a waterspout.
In 1638, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone had its hero journeying to the face of the moon aboard a chariot powered by geese. These tales were amusing but were held as completely impossible.
It was not until the 20th century that rocket science eventually caught up, peaking with NASA’s Apollo 11 mission in 1969 and establishing human travel to the moon as a historical fact.
Artificial Organs
In the 19th century, it was unimaginable to substitute a human heart or a kidney with a machine. The 20th century, however, saw unbelievable leaps in the medical field.
The first successful dialysis machine, an “artificial kidney,” was invented by Willem Kolff in the 1940s. Decades later, in 1982, Robert Jarvik’s Jarvik-7 artificial heart was placed inside a human for the first time, proving that machines could indeed sustain human life.
Wireless Personal Communicators (Smartphones)
In the mid-20th century, comic strip hero Dick Tracy battled crime with his classic two-way wrist radio. This futuristic gadget fascinated the public imagination, but the idea that individuals would one day possess a personal, wireless communications device seemed to be beyond reach.
Flash forward to the 21st century, and the device in your pocket is a thousand times more powerful than Tracy’s fictional gizmo. It’s a phone, camera, computer, and GPS all wrapped in one pocket-sized package, an unthinkable notion back in the day.
Submarines
Leonardo da Vinci designed a submersible vessel in the early 1500s but reportedly kept the plans to himself, fearing they would be used for nefarious purposes.
Throughout the centuries that followed, the notion of a submarine vessel that could journey underwater was a dangerous and impossible fantasy. The earliest submarine, the Turtle, was used unsuccessfully in the American Revolutionary War.
Submarines were not dependable until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they changed naval warfare and deep-sea exploration forever.
The “Thinking Machine” (Computers & AI)
The concept of a machine that could think, reason, and calculate like a human has been a staple of science fiction for centuries. In the 1840s, mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote what are now considered the first computer algorithms for Charles Babbage’s proposed “Analytical Engine,” a mechanical computer that was never built.
She pondered one day whether such a machine could be capable of writing music. Most of her contemporaries believed the concept preposterous. Today, computers perform intricate computation within a few seconds, and artificial intelligence can write articles, design paintings, and even compose music, rendering Lovelace’s eerily accurate prophecy a fact.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Being aware of your exact location anywhere on earth at any time sounds like a superhero ability. Navigating for most of human history involved stars, maps, and landmarks.
The concept of a satellite system that would be able to locate your position was straight out of science fiction. However, the United States Department of Defense began working on such technology in the 1970s for military use.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) was made available to civilians in the early 1980s. Still, widespread civilian use, particularly in vehicles and phones, became truly ordinary much later, mainly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the technology became more affordable and integrated.
Credit Cards
In his utopian romance novel, Looking Backward, published in 1888, Edward Bellamy described a future society where citizens made purchases at a central store using a “credit card” and the amount was charged against their share of the national credit.
In a time of coins and cash, the use of cardboard for purchases once sounded strange and utopian. The concept did not become a reality until the 1950s, with the introduction of the Diners Club card, paving the way for the modern credit economy.
In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)
The concept of giving birth outside the human body was, for centuries, confined to black magic and alchemy. It was considered going against nature.
But in the 20th century, researchers Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe made the breakthrough in in vitro fertilization research. What they did was highly controversial and subject to enormous ethical criticism.
The two men were successful in 1978 when they delivered Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby,” transforming an idea previously considered unthinkable into a medical procedure that has helped millions of families ever since.
Earbuds
In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 science fiction book Fahrenheit 451, individuals listened to “seashells” and “thimble radios”, small, earbud-like sound devices, to tune out the world and listen to an endless stream of entertainment.
Private audio in 1953 was chunky headphones plugged into a record player. Bradbury’s prophecy of unobtrusive, private listening devices inserted into the ear was a peculiarly specific vision of the future.
Today, wireless earbuds are ubiquitous, allowing people to do precisely what Bradbury described: hear their own private universe of music, podcasts, and phone calls.
Tanks
H.G. Wells, the master of speculative fiction, described armored fighting machines as “land ironclads” in a short story published in 1903. The massive, metal-shod monsters were able to cross trenches and crush over enemy defenses.
Men of the era saw the idea as impractical and unwieldy. A little more than ten years later, during World War I, the British developed the first tanks, which were very similar to Wells’ fictional machines and revolutionized land warfare.
Atomic Power and Weapons
Another prediction by H.G. Wells, this time in his 1914 novel The World Set Free, predicted “atomic bombs” that would release unimaginable destructive power. Wells could picture a world transformed through the power of devastation and the promise of limitless power that came from splitting the atom.
Physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932, which inspired him to envision the nuclear chain reaction. Not much more than a decade later, the Manhattan Project made this ghastly, bizarre hypothetical idea a devastating reality, which revolutionized war and geopolitics.
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Disclaimer – This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information. It is not intended to be professional advice.
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