Cool Sci-Fi Tools that are Now the Real Deal!

Sometimes new inventions pop up in the news, and you have to wonder if they're even real! The older I get, the more "space-age" type technology starts showing up in real life. A lot of these cool new inventions were inspired by science fiction from year's past. I'll talk about a few of these in this blog post.

1: The Submarine

I wrote about Jules Verne in a previous post linked here. His story 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea inspired the invention of the Submarine. Verne's story was published in 1870 and featured the Nautilus-- a huge submarine that helped Captain Nemo battle a giant squid. The first submarine was finished in 1898 by American inventor Simon Lake. Lake said that he was directly influence by Verne's story.

Here's the late Leonard Nemoy
with one of the "communicators."
2: The Cell Phone

When Motorola began developing plans for a communications device that you could take anywhere, they looked to Star Trek for inspiration. The hit 1960s television show featured hand-held "communicators" that the characters used to communicate from the surface of planets with their ship.

3: Online Communities/ Virtual Worlds

Before people were playing online games or interacting online in any way, science fiction author Neal Stephenson wrote about online worlds in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. He started the idea of people interacting online with "avatars" way before anything like that actually existed. When game and software developers began looking to create online spaces like this, Snow Crash was an obvious inspiration.

4: The Taser

Ever wondered what TASER stands for? Back in the 1950s, there was a popular science fiction series about a young inventor named Tom Swift. The young man spent his time inventing crazy pieces of technology. When Jack Cover, a NASA physicist, created the first taser, he named the invention after what it was called in a Tom Swift book: Thomas A. Swift's Electronic Rifle. TASER!



Information and images from Smithsonian.com.  

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