Predicting the future

This book tells the stories behind scores of predictions made over the past 140 years. Each prediction, its date, and the name of the predictor is followed by a short essay focusing not only on whether or not it came true, but how it did or why it did not. There are startling predictive successes - like airplanes, television, trips to the moon, and the atomic bomb that came decades before their actuality. Apollo 9 splashed down in the Pacific only two miles from a spot picked out by Jules Verne a century earlier; H. G. Wells coined the term "atomic bomb" in 1913; Edward Bellamy wrote of credit cards in 1888. Predicting the future is a perilous business. While a prediction that proves correct may considerably enhance your fame, your reputation can be forever clouded by a bad enough mistake. There are also those, several of whom you will meet in this book, who are best remembered for having got it dreadfully wrong - indeed some poor souls are remembered only for that reason. Some of the worst flubs have come from nay-sayers - that nobody would be interested in talking pictures or want to own a personal computer, for example. But right or wrong, the history of predictions tells us where we've been, how we got to where we are, and where we may go yet.