TRUTH may be stranger than fiction, but fiction sometimes gets there first.

In the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey a spaceship crewman uses a videophone to call home for a chat with his daughter, while another character taps into a foolscap-sized electronic notepad to access automatically updated news reports.

Thirty-six years ago Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, had foreseen camera phones, texting and Teletext. But the great futurologist predicted more, and sooner.

In 1945, in a letter to the editor of Wireless World entitled Peacetime Uses for V2, Clarke proposed geostationary satellites. The idea that a satellite in equatorial orbit 22,000 miles above the earth would remain over the same spot on the ground remained fantasy until Early Bird was launched in 1965. Geostationary satellites are now at the heart of global telecommunications, which would not function without them.

In the 1960s, Clarke foresaw a day when people would be contactable through wristwatch phones wherever they were on the planet. Mobile phones are not quite that small yet, but they are going that way.

The internet was fiction long before it was fact. In his first novel Neuromancer, published in 1984, the American writer William Gibson invented the terms “cyberspace” and “matrix” to describe a world beyond the computer screen in which every computer and every information store is linked in what he calls “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system”.

In the Terminator films, the computers owned by the US military are linked into one web called SkyNET. One character explains: “New. Powerful. Hooked into everything. Trusted to run it all. They say it got smart . . . a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.”

It’s easy enough to extrapolate when you see the direction technology is taking. But what we now have has long been wished for.

Samuel Morse, an American portrait painter, was moved to develop the electric telegraph in 1835 after it took a week for him to receive news of his wife’s death. He dreamt of “a worldwide communications system, erasing barriers of time and space, so that no one would be unable to reach a loved one in time of need”. His dot-and-dash code is really the same binary principle on which all computers now work.

Having invented the basic telephone, Alexander Graham Bell produced a prototype Photophone in 1880 using electricity, glass and mirrors. It may have disappeared up a technological cul-de-sac, but it was the first recorded instance of the human voice being carried by radiated electromagnetic waves, the Cro-Magnon ancestor of today’s mobile phone technology.

But you will search William Gibson’s books in vain for any mention of a cheap, easy and portable mobile phone that can reach anyone in the world. He admitted that, in 1984, he had thought the idea far too implausible. He should have read Arthur C. Clarke.

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