15) Cell Phones

When the first flip phones were produced, many people commented that they looked like the communicators in Star Trek. That’s no coincidence. Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first handheld mobile phone, has credited Captain Kirk’s nifty gadget with inspiring the whole concept of the portable phone.

14) Submarine

Submarines have been around since the Civil War and even used in combat. However, it wasn’t until Jules Verne published his classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1870 that engineers began to envision more advanced submersibles that could probe even deeper into the ocean.

13) Electronic Book Readers

In most science fiction, paper is a thing of the past, and some recent gadgets show a push in that direction. Owners of e-book readers like the Kindle have Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to thank for first describing a portable, paperless reference book.

12) Powered Exoskeleton

Probably the most famous scene in the second Aliens movie is when Ripley saves a little girl using a hydraulic exoskeleton. Someone in the military seems to have taken notice, since engineers recently unveiled an exoskeleton that helps a person lift 200 pounds like it was nothing at all. One inventor in Japan even went the extra mile and developed a functional suit almost identical to the one in the movie.

11) Home Theaters

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 featured very little in the way of high tech gadgetry, with the exception of special “parlours” in people’s homes that would have large television screens on one or more walls complete with surround sound systems. Today, you can find that in your average suburban home, except we call them “home theaters.”

10) Computerized Language Translation (Hitchhiker’s Guide)

“Babel Fish” wasn’t just a random name AltaVista came up with for their web translation software. This was actually an alien species from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that could translate any language after being put into a person’s ear.

9) TASER

When Jack Cover developed his first prototype for a less-lethal alternative to guns, he gave it an acronym that stands for “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.” Cove chose the name after the hero of a science fiction series he had read as a child, one of which featured an “electric rifle” that was used for hunting.

8 ) Computer Viruses

Hey, no one said science fiction only inspires good inventions. When researchers accidentally created the first computer virus in 1975, they described it as a “worm.” The term was taken from John Brunner’s novel, The Shockwave Rider, in which a “tapeworm” begins to infect computers worldwide.

7) Orbiting Satellites

Author Edward Everett Hale first explored the idea of a satellite in his short story, “The Brick Moon,” but it was famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke who first proposed satellites as a means for mass communication. He wrote an article in 1945 that described communication devices hovering in orbit to provide high-speed global communication. Seven years later, Sputnik was launched.

6) VCR/DVD Player

While most of the world was marveling at the invention of motion pictures in the 1890’s, H.G. Wells was already thinking of ways to make it better. At one point in his novel, When the Sleeper Wakes, a man discovers a machine that seems to store and play individual movies for entertainment.

5) PDA or Pocket Computer

In 1974, when most computers were large enough to fill whole rooms, Larry Niven envisioned a pocket-sized version in The Mote in God’s Eye. The “pocket computers” are mostly used for mathematical calculations and note taking, but with their communication functions, Niven might as well be describing a Blackberry or an iPhone.

4) Robots (R.U.R. by Karel Capek, Metropolis)

The idea of constructing artificial life has been around for centuries, but the term “robot” was first introduced in Karel Capek’s play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). However, it wasn’t until the 1927 film, Metropolis, that people began seeing robots as humanoid machines that could be controlled by a programmer.

3) Space Travel

Even though his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, was meant to be a comedy, Jules Verne did some serious calculations to back up his tale of three men trying to travel to the moon using a cannon. Some of his theories and equations turned out to be surprisingly accurate to those used in the Apollo missions, and he even correctly predicted that weightlessness would exist in space.

2) Internet

William Gibson’s book, Neuromancer, simultaneously set the basis for the cyberpunk genre as well as the internet (or more accurately, the World Wide Web). In his dystopian world, almost everyone can access a global computer network using special brain interfaces, which allows everyone on the planet to exchange information instantly. Sound familiar?

1) Atomic Bomb

It’s not hard to imagine a huge explosion, but Robert Cromie envisioned the means to do so that would eventually become reality. In The Crack of Doom, he wrote about a weapon that used the energy of an atom to decimate nearly two square miles of land. Over four decades later, the Manhattan Project was well under way.