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On 3 April 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper stood on a Manhattan pavement and made a phone call. The phone was a 1.1kg brick he was holding in his hand. The person on the other end was his rival at Bell Labs, who was presumably not delighted to hear from him. Pedestrians stared. It would be another decade before you could buy anything like it.
Cooper’s team had been inspired by the communicator on Star Trek, which had aired seven years earlier. That pattern, fiction sketching the outline of something decades before engineers fill it in, runs through a surprising amount of the hardware in your pocket right now. Here are seven examples that made the journey from page or screen into ordinary life.
1. Video calling
AT&T unveiled the Picturephone at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, complete with its own pavilion and a queue of curious visitors. The demo call ran to Disneyland in California. A three-minute link between New York and Chicago cost $16, which is roughly $160 in today’s money, and the picture was grainy and slow.
It flopped. By the early 1970s only a few hundred Picturephones were in service, and AT&T quietly shut the project down. The idea sat in cold storage until FaceTime arrived in 2010. Then the pandemic did the rest: Zoom went from about 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to roughly 300 million four months later. Today a teenager video-calls a friend from a bus stop without thinking about it twice.
2. Computers that answer you out loud
HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) held conversations, read lips, and politely refused to open the pod bay doors. Star Trek crews asked their ship’s computer questions and got answers back in a calm voice. For most of the 1980s and 90s, that sort of thing felt as remote as warp drive.
Siri landed on the iPhone 4S in October 2011. Amazon put Alexa in a smart speaker three years later. Ask your kitchen to set a timer for nine minutes tonight and you are doing something that was a running joke about the future in 1975.
The translator in your ear
Douglas Adams imagined the Babel fish in 1979, a small yellow creature you stick in your ear that decodes any language on the spot. Google added a conversation mode to Translate in 2011. Google’s own Pixel Buds attempted live translation in 2017 to mixed reviews. By 2025 the technology had quietly matured: earbuds that carry a real conversation between two people who share no common language, with a delay of a second or two. Adams described it as absurd. It now costs about £200.
3. Cars that do the driving
General Motors filled a 36,000-square-foot model of 1960s America with automated highways at its Futurama exhibit in 1939. In the late 1950s engineers tested cars steered by cables buried in the road surface. None of it worked well enough to sell.
The modern version started with a modified Toyota Prius. Google’s self-driving project crossed 100,000 autonomous miles by 2012, and its successor Waymo moved past 150,000 paid robotaxi rides a week in Phoenix and San Francisco by late 2024. You do not need to live in Phoenix to feel the change, either. Adaptive cruise control and lane centring now come standard on cars costing under $30,000, which means millions of drivers hand over steering responsibility on the motorway every single day.
4. The wrist radio that became a health monitor
Chester Gould drew a two-way wrist radio into the Dick Tracy comic strip in 1946, and readers wrote in asking whether such a thing could actually be built. Electronics were nowhere close.
The Apple Watch launched in April 2015 and has since accumulated a genuinely medical toolkit: ECG readings, atrial fibrillation notifications, blood oxygen tracking, fall detection that automatically calls emergency services. Tucked in the $10 plastic band you wear for the gym is a suite of sensors that would have been a hospital-grade research project fifty years ago. Every smartwatch generation also ships with a compass, GPS and a cellular connection. Dick Tracy’s radio did one thing. Yours does 400.
5. A library that fits in your hand
The residents of the Enterprise carried PADDs, thin slabs of glass they tapped and swiped to read reports. That was Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, and it looked admirably plausible for about twenty years.
The Kindle arrived in 2007 with 90,000 titles and sold out in five and a half hours. The iPad followed in 2010 and moved 15 million units in nine months. Combine those two ideas and you get the thing you carry everywhere: a device that holds a couple of thousand books, a streaming library of every album you owned as a teenager, and the map of every road in Europe, all weighing less than a paperback.
6. Reality with an extra layer on top
Ivan Sutherland built the first head-mounted display in 1968. It was so heavy it had to be hung from the ceiling, and it earned the nickname The Sword of Damocles. Boeing engineers coined the phrase “augmented reality” in 1990 while trying to work out how to guide assembly workers without printing paper diagrams.
Pokémon Go put AR on 100 million phones in the summer of 2016. Since then, headsets have crept toward the mainstream, and the arrival of spatial computing as a genuine everyday category has started to shift how designers think about screens at all. One small detail still gets me: the video passthrough on modern headsets is fast enough that you forget you are looking at a camera feed rather than the room itself.
7. The robot vacuum cleaner
Rosie the Robot vacuumed the Jetsons’ house in 1962. Roomba reached living rooms forty years later, and every early review made the same joke about the housekeeping robot that keeps bumping into the furniture. That is exactly what it did, for hours at a time, until the battery ran down.
iRobot had sold more than a million units by 2004. The current generation maps your floor plan with a laser, empties its own bin into a dock, and lifts its mop head when it moves onto carpet. Roughly 15 to 20 million robot vacuums were sold worldwide in 2024 alone, which makes the Jetsons’ most famous gadget the least remarkable thing in the entire house now.
Honourable mentions worth knowing
- Drones. Arthur C. Clarke described aerial delivery machines in Earthlight in 1955. Delivery drones have been dropping parcels in parts of rural Scandinavia and Australia since the mid-2010s.
- Contactless payment. Tap-and-go cards and phone wallets were a staple of 1990s cyberpunk. London’s Oyster card showed the way in 2003, and now you can board a bus in virtually any large city by pressing a card to a reader.
- Video doorbells. A door that lets you see and speak to whoever is standing outside was a running plot device in 1940s pulp stories. The first Ring doorbell shipped in 2013.
- Satellite internet. Clarke proposed geostationary communications satellites in a 1945 paper that many editors dismissed as fantasy. Low-orbit constellations now provide broadband to remote areas and to aircraft in flight.
What is already scripted for the next decade
Some of the fiction has not been caught up to yet, and you can see the gap clearly. Brain-computer interfaces are no longer hypothetical: Neuralink implanted its first device in a human in January 2024, and the patient demonstrated playing online chess using nothing but thought signals. Electric air taxis sit in the same position that self-driving cars did in 2010, tested and certified but not yet part of the morning commute. Holographic displays still look more like a trade show novelty than a product, though the core principles behind spatial computing suggest the display of the future is worn rather than mounted on a wall.
The interesting part is not that the predictions come true. It is how ordinary the results become. Cooper’s brick, a wild idea borrowed from a cancelled science fiction show, sits inside a slab of aluminium in your pocket, and the only people who stare at it now are the ones annoyed that you are scrolling during dinner. Every item on this list took somewhere between ten and fifty years to cross over, and every one of them stopped being remarkable within about eighteen months of arriving.
