The Predictions of Nikola Tesla
The famed Serbian American inventor Nikola Tesla predicted personal wireless devices -- in 1909. "It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world so simply that any individual can own and operate his own apparatus."
Though far beyond imagination at that time, Tesla predicted that this wireless device would be hand-held, straightforward to use and that one day it would be possible to send wireless messages all over the world. In addition, "the household's daily newspaper will be printed wirelessly in the home during the night." Sound familiar?
Tesla was also able to accurately predict the nature of humanity as well as technology. Believing that "the solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine," Tesla foresaw a world where science, not power and conflict, became the top priority for humankind:
"Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats."
The Predictions of George Orwell's 1984
Initially George Orwell's dystopian science-fiction novel 1984 seemed exactly that - science fiction. But fast forward to the 21st Century and things begin to look a bit spookier. Orwell's vision of a humanity kept under constant surveillance by Big Brother is something that is, unfortunately, familiar to most of us. In 1948, when Orwell wrote 1984, television technology was in its infancy and cameras were big and cumbersome; just the idea of closed circuit surveillance cameras was entirely removed from reality.
But it wasn't just CCTV that Orwell predicted with eerie accuracy -- like Tesla before him, Orwell was apparently a bit of a wizard at predicting the technology of the future. Orwell writes about "telescreens [that] received and transmitted simultaneously" -- in 2014, how uncannily similar this is to the handheld "telescreens" we carry with us everywhere we go and almost never turn off.
Orwell's genius is not reserved for technological predictions though, as he also correctly predicted future advancements in aesthetics. In 1984, surgeons were able to "alter people beyond recognition" and literally modify a person's appearance entirely. This was just a dream in the 1940s - the first face transplant didn't occur until 2005 - but in today's world, drastic changes in one's appearance are often seen as the norm.
The Prediction of the Periodic Table
In 1863, only 60 of the 118 elements were known -- and yet Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, somehow designed a periodic table that foretold the weights and properties of the undiscovered elements perfectly. Is this an example of psychic powers being used to advance the knowledge of the world? Well, maybe... but in this case it's more likely that Mendeleev was an exceptional scientist and used his knowledge and some guesswork to make these scarily accurate predictions.
By establishing the atomic weight and properties of elements, Mendeleev began to see patterns in the table. He then observed the spaces and predicted which elements could, and would fill, them. Among many of these projected elements is germanium, which wasn't discovered until 23 years later; Mendeleev even named the element "ekasilicon."