Where do big new ideas come from? Filmmakers and science fiction writers brim over with creativity. And they are often way ahead of their time. Some of their fantastical ideas end up becoming reality later down the line, as our photo gallery shows.
As far back as 1964 Captain Kirk was having wireless telephone conversations with the Enterprise crew. His transmitting device, the "communicator", was similar to today's mobile phones. But the first mobile telephone patent wouldn't be registered by Motorola until almost ten years later.
Jules Verne was one of the founding fathers of science fiction literature: one of his novels, published in 1865, was entitled "From the Earth to the Moon". Although it was fully a hundred years before the first moon landing actually took place, his novel foretells many of the details of the first real moon landing.
Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction classic "2001 – A Space Odyssey" was groundbreaking and, these days, the videophone and flat screens he imagined have made the leap into reality. Skype and other services are now commonplace.
Science fiction literature doesn't skip over the darker side of technological development either. As early as 1903 H.G. Wells already foresaw the destructive power of nuclear weapons at a time when radioactivity had barely been discovered.
The tablet is another example of the pioneering vision of Stanley Kubrick and the makers of the Star Trek series. Many years before the first iPad hit the shelves very similar devices, called PADDs, were already being used aboard the Enterprise. Its crew used their touchscreen computers just like we use tablets: to look up information, write reports and view images.
