Back in 1870, Jules Verne’s book about an electric submarine traveling 20,000 leagues under the sea was first published.
90 years later in 1960, those electric submarines were finally invented.
It’s a classic question of prediction vs. influence — how can you really say a book predicted the future if it didn’t in some way inspire the discovery?
Printerinks.com created a fantastic infographic that tried to answer this question. It shows the timeline of seemingly precognitive books, as well as the actual discoveries they predicted.
From “Gulliver’s Travels” to “1984,” these are the 24 books that forecasted the future.
