From the American Annual of Photography and Photographic Times Almanac, 1892

Predicting the wireless transmission of 3-D movies, which, today, is taken for granted, though the author is a bit too optimistic by seeming to predict such things as possible in 1932, forty years in the future of the date of publication .

The comment about Mr. Haggard's "She" refers to She: A History of Adventure

The prediction of television.

So many other predictions became reality. Some were science fiction dreams.

One wonders if the human mind's evolution is steered by the pure quantum physics happening with its very molecular makeup as if the universe is using us as an instrument to observe itself.

I am still in awe of the "two-way wrist radio" that appeared in the Sunday newspaper comics under the guidance of "Dick Tracy". Being just a young kid in the 1940's, I just assumed it was forever fiction just like the rockets they sent to other planets that did a 180 degree turn and landed on the tail fins of the rocket.

I also contemplate the five stents that I have had installed for thirteen years and how sad it is that they could have saved my father from an early death if they had been available for him. My eighty years on this earth have seen a lot of predictions and dreams become realities. When I get negative about whether this country can survive another eighty, I have to remind myself that my generation was the one being taught to "duck and cover" to help us naively hope that we could survive a nuclear attack on our school.

Now that I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I guess I feel the need to maybe provide them a "duck and cover" strategy to combat their fear of catastrophic future potentials. As so aptly stated in SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, " hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies." If God provided divine intervention for future president Donald Trump, maybe He has more in store for humanity. Therein lies the hope factor I need to believe in..........

It’s been said, accurately I think, that we generally overestimate the rate of technology advance in the near term and underestimate it in the long term.

I remember watching re-runs of the original Star Trek series, and thinking, wow, it'd be really cool to ask a computer questions, and it would answer you.

The reference to Edison's Kinetograph is interesting. The Kinetograph was announced to the public in June of 1891 but practically no one had seen motion pictures when the posted excerpt was published in 1892, including the author, Mr. J. Will Barbour.

The Kinetograph was Edison's motion picture camera. The Kinetoscope was the device which displayed these motion pictures and that device did not make its public debut until 1894. The first motion pictures were not projected onto a screen (the form we know as "cinema"). Instead, a viewer looked into the viewfinder while standing at the Kinetoscope, manually turning a handle to power the motion of the film.

What I find particularly interesting about this comment made before the introduction of the Kinetoscope is that if you look at contemporary newspaper articles, you will find awkward descriptions of the produced effect, attempting to describe motion pictures to people who had never before seen them. We take it for granted these days, but if you think about it, it would be difficult to describe motion pictures to someone who had only seen still photographs. Only a live demonstration of the technology would suffice.

The same kinds of awkward descriptions can be found in newspapers of 1839 and 1840, at the introduction of the Daguerreotype, the first practical form of photography, attempting to describe photographs to people who had before seen only paintings and drawings.

All of this may sound unlikely, but it's true, and these contemporary accounts demonstrate what a remarkable leap were these new technologies.

Those are the visionaries of which I am not one of them.

Cable was just starting when I was in high school, maybe 1973. We still had rabbit ears on top of our TV. They just built the Sutro Tower antenna tower on top of Twin Peaks in San Francisco giving a strong TV signal over the air.

Our electronics teacher was saying that at that time, TV signals were going over the air and telephone calls were going through copper wires. But most people's calls were just a few miles from their house. I distinctly remember my teacher saying that soon, tv signals were going to go through wires and phone calls were going to go throuh the air.

It didn't make sense to me given the Sutro tower antenna that was built. Two decades later, cell phones started showing up and, at that time, I bought the clunky portable phones because it was an easy way for my parents to get ahold of me as they were aging and my Dad started getting lost in the city because of his Alzheimers.

As a kid in the mid 70's, my mom would take us to the shoe store for our once a year purchase just before school started.
The shoe store had a kinetoscope. I remember going watching a man and a woman dancing together.
Star Trek's communicator is now our cell phone.
Robbie the Robot has come to fruition.
Some science fiction should be left alone though.