Pre-prepared meals. The proliferation of ready meals in supermarkets and takeaway shops in High Streets suggests that Watkins was right, although he envisaged the meals would be delivered on plates which would be returned to the cooking establishments to be washed. Slowing population growth. The figure is too high, says Nilsson, but at least Watkins was guessing in the right direction.
If the US population had grown by the same rate it did between and , it would have exceeded 1 billion in Hothouse vegetables. Winter will be turned into summer and night into day by the farmer, said Watkins, with electric wires under the soil and large gardens under glass.
Electric currents applied to the soil will make valuable plants to grow larger and faster, and will kill troublesome weeds. Rays of coloured light will hasten the growth of many plants. Electricity applied to garden seeds will make them sprout and develop unusually early. Large gardens under glass were already a reality, says Philip Norman of the Garden Museum in London, but he was correct to predict the use of electricity.
Although coloured lights and electric currents did not take off, they were probably experimented with. But the earliest item we have is a booklet Electricity in Your Garden detailing electrically warmed frames, hotbeds and cloches and electrically heated greenhouses, issued by the British Electrical Development Association. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span.
Watkins foresaw cameras and screens linked by electric circuits, a vision practically realised in the 20th Century by live international television and latterly by webcams. Leonardo da Vinci had talked about this, says Nilsson, but Watkins was taking it further. There weren't many people that far-sighted. Bigger fruit. Lots of larger varieties of fruit have been developed in the past century, but Watkins was over-optimistic with regard to strawberries.
The Acela Express. It would be more than six decades before Theodore Maiman fired up the first operational laser at California's Hughes Research Laboratory on May 16, , but military thinkers had been hoping to weaponize the conceptual laser even before it was even proven practical. Typically, Wells was more interested in what the effects of his future ideas might be, rather than working out the technical details, James stresses.
So in The Time Machine , if you think of time as the fourth dimension, what if you could travel in time as freely as in the other three? Or, in The First Men in the Moon , what if you could make a material [Wells called it Cavorite] as impervious to gravity as other materials are impervious to heat?
Today's leading science fiction authors still use this technique while at work shaping the future of tomorrow. Wells reveled in the potential benefits of technology but also feared their dark side. Wells recognized the world-changing destructive power that might be harnessed by splitting the atom. The atomic bombs he introduces in The World Set Free fuel a war so devastating that its survivors are moved to create a unified world government to avoid future conflicts.
Wells's bombs differed from those actually developed by scientists with the Manhattan Project. They exploded continually, for days, weeks or months depending upon their size, as the elements in them furiously radiated energy during their degeneration and in the process created mini-volcanoes of death and destruction.
Wells rejected the idea that the future is unknowable, writes esteemed science fiction writer James Gunn , who also helped to pioneer university study of science fiction. But Wells did have other big ideas that haven't come to fruition, though of course there's always the chance that his vision extended farther into the future than our own time. As of this writing we've not been invaded by Martians.
Human invisibility also remains elusive—though science is making progress in that direction. The time machine, an invention introduced in a novella, hasn't been worked out either.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment to Wells was the failure of his idealized political vision, a world government, which he described in A Modern Utopia Wells, who died in , lived long enough to learn that this imagined future wasn't likely to ever come true, so he took a very active role in fostering international cooperation wherever he could.
Here we look at nine of the most famous seers from the past five centuries. Michel de Nostredame , known by the Latin form Nostradamus, was a leading Renaissance man whose work as an astrologer took him to the French royal court, where he did horoscopes for Catherine de Medici and later became court physician. The enduring popular image of Nostradamus is of the bearded medieval mystic sitting in his dark attic, quill in hand, looking into a bowl of water scrying.
Here the Frenchman foresaw some of the great events of history, including the rise of Napoleon and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Read more about: Mysteries Nostradamus: Which of his predictions came true? This has been interpreted by some to refer to Adolf Hitler.
The Hitler interpretation was made by writer Erika Cheetham , and despite being heavily disputed by scholars has continued to hold sway in the popular imagination. One day the young man spoke up and eerily pointed at an ox, predicting its imminent death.
Shocked farm hands then watched the animal keel over and expire in front of them. Powerful seer or budding vet? One night Nixon regaled drinkers in a local tavern with all the forthcoming events he had seen in a vision in the sky, such as the rise of Oliver Cromwell and the French Revolution. The Cheshire Prophet declared in the pub:. Two hundred years later, in , a raven did reputedly build a nest in a gargoyle on top of a Cheshire church the day before James II was dethroned and exiled to France, where he died.
By the mids word was spreading throughout England of a wondrous Benedictine nun named Elizabeth Barton By the early s, Sister Barton was popular and influential. Sister Elizabeth Barton was executed on 20th April along with five of her key allies. In he published his Christian Astrology , considered one of the most important works in western astrology. His 36 almanacs contained all manner of prophecies and predictions.
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