Attempts to predict the future are as old as humankind. Early forms of prediction were religious prophecies of salvation or damnation. In the nineteenth century, with the start of the Industrial Age, a new kind of prediction came into being, as people began to imagine future technological innovations extrapolated from what was already known.This book tells the stories behind scores of predictions made over the past 150 years. Each prediction, its date, and the name of the predictor are 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.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. Predictions that get remembered tend to be either spectacularly right or hilariously wrong. 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.