# Who predicted integrated circuits in science fiction? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 3, 2011, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990 "2011-04-03T00:31:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![thelabdude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dc4da7/32.png) [@thelabdude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelabdude)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/61 "2011-04-04T17:10:04Z")
How about Luke and Chewbacca using stick welders to repair their ship? I think maybe wire feed ones were already available. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/62 "2011-04-04T17:24:52Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > That’s interesting. I am only afraid the a space elevator will be a giant structure. The biggest ever built in the history of the world, and to finance that will be the main problem. > I could bet that laser propulsion could be a cheaper and more practical way to achieve the same goal: sending loads to space continuosly. Space elevators don’t necessarily have to be huge except in length. It’s been proposed that the first one might be a ribbon only a few centimeters wide and less than a millimeter thick, able to haul up a few hundred kilos at a time. If for any reason it broke, the lower part would mostly burn up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and what didn’t would float to the ground like confetti. The problem with laser propulsion is that if the laser facility costs hundred of billions of dollars, launches won’t be cheap even after amortizing the cost over decades. Plus there’s the problem that it would effectively be an enormously powerful beam weapon capable of destroying anything in it’s line of sight for hundreds of kilometers. That’s going to worry a lot of people. ---
**Author:** ![EdwardLost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/bbe5ce/32.png) [@EdwardLost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdwardLost)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/63 "2011-04-04T18:13:30Z")
A little off-topic, but a thread a few months ago got me wondering: What truly novel technologies were developed in the 20th century? That is, if you transchroned a smart scientist/engineer from 1900 to the year 2000, what would he see that would baffle him? He might ooh and aah over jet liners, space shuttles, transcontinental phone calls, CRT TVs, etc. but he would be able to figure out how they worked with a little poking around. But integrated circuits, LCD screens and other electronics would stump him. He’d figure out that those little lines are tiny wires and that electricity is involved, but he would lack the knowledge of atomic structure and quantum mechanics to deduce any more. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/64 "2011-04-04T19:20:35Z")
One thing I wondered about: In Von Braun’s elaborate plans for space stations, trips to Mars, etc. (which he worked out in great detail), he had astronauts wearing those coke-bottle like mini-spacecraft (with mechanical arms), instead of spacesuits. Surprising how these things never got invented. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/65 "2011-04-04T19:33:30Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > Another little fillip from the film is the idea that circuits would need to be monitored constantly for failure and that an automated system of replacing damaged circuits would need to be employed. That’s a dead give-away this is from the pre-microchip era: Integrated circuits in use essentially never fail except under extreme conditions. (That is, their mean time between failure is much longer than their expected service lifetime, at least in home systems.) It’s a fine example of how advances in technology can make the overall system much simpler. I wish. While most field failures come from undetected faults fabricated into the chip, as feature sizes shrink there is going to be more and more need for this. High reliability systems, such as servers, are doing parity and more stringent checks on memories, and there are systems out there which will run full tests on memories and swap in new rows and columns to replace defective ones each time the system is powered up. There is a lot of discussion about monitoring logic also. Most of the applications are for things like space flight, but there is active research in this. Check out [this book](http://www.amazon.com/Methods-Concurrent-Checking-Frontiers-Electronic/dp/9048178762/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1301945292&sr=1-1) on the subject. It is certainly true that ICs are a lot more reliable than boards, but bravo for anyone even thinking in those terms back then. On topic, I’m in IC design and I have over 5,000 SF books and magazines, and I don’t recall a good prediction of the IC. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/66 "2011-04-04T19:37:47Z")
> [@EdwardLost](#): > > A little off-topic, but a thread a few months ago got me wondering: What truly novel technologies were developed in the 20th century? That is, if you transchroned a smart scientist/engineer from 1900 to the year 2000, what would he see that would baffle him? He might ooh and aah over jet liners, space shuttles, transcontinental phone calls, CRT TVs, etc. but he would be able to figure out how they worked with a little poking around. But integrated circuits, LCD screens and other electronics would stump him. He’d figure out that those little lines are tiny wires and that electricity is involved, but he would lack the knowledge of atomic structure and quantum mechanics to deduce any more. That’s a good one, especially since the scientist from 1900 might not even have a microscope good enough to see the active elements, many of which are buried. It is tricky for us to reliably expose the layers, say to look for a defect, and we know what we are looking for. I think CDs and DVDs would be another item. All they are, apparently, are shiny metal disks with no features below, yet they can play music or movies. Can you even detect what is there without a laser? ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/67 "2011-04-04T19:50:06Z")
> [@](#): > > All they are, apparently, are shiny metal disks with no features below, yet they can play music or movies. Can you even detect what is there without a laser? Certainly you can. From the way they appear to have rainbows, an astute observer familiar with optics can deduce that they contain concentric tracks, and even calculate the spacing. (For a “Hands-On Science” thing that I do for kids, I show them how to build spectroscopes using CDs and DVDs. This is just working that backwards). By analogy with phonograph disks (which also work as diffraction gratings, only not as well), you can figure that the sound is somehow encoded in those regular features. You can do that all without recourse to a microscope. With a microscope, you can see the pits (they’re not _that_ small – their size is limited by the recording and reading capability of your sources). realizing that it’s not a single groove as in a phonograph record, I think that someone studying it would eventually figure out that the signal is stored in a non-analog fashion. Once there, they’d eventually figure out how to reconstitute it. A science fiction example of this is in Harry Turtledove’s _World war_ series, where circa 1940 earth people try to figure out the invading aliens’ digital devices. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/68 "2011-04-04T20:52:03Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > One thing I wondered about: In Von Braun’s elaborate plans for space stations, trips to Mars, etc. (which he worked out in great detail), he had astronauts wearing those coke-bottle like mini-spacecraft (with mechanical arms), instead of spacesuits. > Surprising how these things never got invented. They’d need their own propulsion system, which adds weight and complexity. So far, the need for EVA has been minimal enough that it isn’t worth it- they can do a lot just by having astronauts ride the end of those mechanical arms. In fact they abandoned the Manned Maneuvering Unit they’d developed for use with the Shuttle. We’ll have to get to the shipyard-in-space level of construction before they’ll ever need anything like that. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2011, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/69 "2011-04-04T23:36:22Z")
**Voyager** : Very interesting about the IC failures. It’s beginning to sound more and more like the old days using vacuum tubes, when logic elements would effectively ‘vote’ on the right answer. **EdwardLost** : If you showed him a computer and demonstrated everything it could do he would go nuts trying to figure out how you crammed all the requisite hardware into the space allowed. He’d also have a devil of a time figuring out how you even crafted the hardware needed to, say, play a video such that you can use the mouse to move the window the video is playing in across the screen. So my candidate for the biggest new invention that would completely stump the average scientist from the 19th Century is _software_, as distinct from hardware. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/70 "2011-04-05T00:33:23Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > **Voyager** : Very interesting about the IC failures. It’s beginning to sound more and more like the old days using vacuum tubes, when logic elements would effectively ‘vote’ on the right answer. When I was at Illinois the story went that the vacuum tubes in Iliac II were spring loaded, so that when one failed they launched themselves from the socket, and grad student ran around with bushel baskets catching them. Totally unconfirmed, but it would be awesome if it were true. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/71 "2011-04-05T00:44:22Z")
People of the 19th centuries had calculators, and also had the Babbage attempt to build a mechanical computer, including the Ada Lovelace programs. If they were educated enough, particularly if they knew about these Victorian projects, I don’t think they will be so surprised by our computers at all. By the way, another visionary that foresaw Internet, even earlier than Murray Leinster, it was this French visionary Paul Otlet who in 1934 published “The treaty on documentation”. Run the video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyfZkVgasI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyfZkVgasI) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/72 "2011-04-05T01:15:51Z")
pinguin writes: \> There are exceptions, though, and those exceptional writers are the ones I am \> interested in. For instance, the visions of the future of Vernor Vinge and Crichton You’re still doing nothing except listing random predictions that happen to have come true and claiming that the authors of those were exceptional. Give us a list of the authors who you claim are exceptional and some predictions that came true for each of those authors. I’d guess that for each of them we can come up with many other predictions which didn’t come true and that for many other authors we could come up with predictions that they made that did come true. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/73 "2011-04-05T01:41:21Z")
A list. Sure. This is a list of SOME exceptional authors of Science Fiction (only sci fi) and what predicted. (1) Edgard Allan Poe. The baloon Hoax. Predicts the airship. (2) Hans Christian Andersen. In a thousand years. Predicts air travel and tourism. (3) Verne. From the Earth to the Moon. Around the Moon. Predict the travel of Apollo VIII. (4) Edward Everett Hale. A moon brick. Predicted the satellites, the ceramic shields for reentry, space transports, satelite telecomunications, weather watching, GPS, etc. (5) Tsiolkowsy. Everything about rockets. (6) H.G. Wells. Predicted the tank, the air fight, the atomic bomb, lasers and the fourth dimension in relativity. (7) Albert Robida. Predicted, among other things, the home theatre and the aerodinamic trains. (8) Murray Leinster. Internet. (9) Aldoux Huxley. Industrial biology of human beings. (10) Arthur Clarke. Satelites. Just as a sample. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/74 "2011-04-05T02:02:07Z")
Oh my stars and garters. > [@pinguin](#): > > A list. Sure. This is a list of SOME exceptional authors of Science Fiction (only sci fi) and what predicted. > > (1) Edgard Allan Poe. The baloon Hoax. Predicts the airship. Is this a joke? The balloon was invented in 1789, 55 years before the hoax. It was in wide use all over Europe and in the U.S. at the time. As it must have been to make the story believable. [deleted for time] > [@](#): > > (10) Arthur Clarke. Satelites. Ludicrous. Satellites had been talked about for hundreds of years. Clarke mentioned geosynchronous orbits in a **technical paper**. There are thousands, millions, of papers, books, speeches, articles in newspapers and magazines in dozens of countries over centuries of time that can be addressed here. Of course people talked about flying as something that would happen. The Greeks talked about flight and so had a million cultures since. How does that even qualify as a prediction? You keep talking about science fiction writers and then fall back on anyone who ever wrote, said, invented, or speculated about the future whenever you’re challenged. That makes it incredibly easy to cherrypick all of history to prove whatever point it is you’re trying to make. Which is what? That people in the past talked about the future, sometimes saying things that today can be said to be in the ballpark? Can anything be more obvious than that? There are literally hundreds of books and thousands of shorter pieces that have addressed this. What are you trying to say that hasn’t been said a thousand times, mostly as inaccurately as what you’e doing? ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/75 "2011-04-05T02:14:43Z")
The ballon was invented in 1789 but the airship was invented at the end of the 19th century! To convert a ballon into an airship you need a propeller! And propellers for airships didn’t exist in times of Poe. By the way, Verne’s 5 weeks in ballon were inspired by that tale of Poe. For satellites, if you don’t like Clarke, read Edward Everett Hale, the Moon Brick. He is a 19th century American writer. You can find his tale in NASA. I don’t know why it is so difficult for you to accept that some people predict the future, by just thinking a bit about the solutions of certain problems. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/76 "2011-04-05T02:33:36Z")
Dude, I know because this is my field. I’ve studied it for decades. I’ve done 500\* times more reading on the subject than you have. What I’ve learned is that writings about the future are more dependent on what is happening in that present than on anything else. Predictions from the past are a game for amateurs. I think of them as I would proofs of trisecting the angle. Mathematicians know it can’t be done because it’s proven to be impossible. But amateurs love to prove it anyway. And they can’t be told that their “proofs” are meaningless. Predictions - right or wrong - make for easy feature articles and gushing websites. No serious historian ever talks about rightness or wrongness, though. They talk about why the person thought at the time that this was something that should be said. (You can’t seriously think that Poe was the first person to realize that a balloon needed steering, can you?) That’s far more interesting and instructive about the past, but also tremendously more work. \*I had a professor who told the class that a good teacher should know 500 times more about the subject than the pupils. Every day and every webpage I read I realize more and more how right he was. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/77 "2011-04-05T05:25:11Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > For satellites, if you don’t like Clarke, read Edward Everett Hale, the Moon Brick. He is a 19th century American writer. You can find his tale in NASA. I think the idea of an earth satellite was “predicted” about a billion years before Hale’s story (which I’ve read.) Verne’s prediction of moon travel didn’t include them getting smeared on the floor of the cabin the way they would have been. Wells considered his book more accurate because at least it didn’t violate the laws of nature quite so blatantly (only more subtly.) While warp drive may be nonsensical, it is less so than a story which has the ship accelerate to ftl speeds. As mentioned, Clarke’s article was not sf at all. And he always assumed that comsats would have all sorts of people manning them, not that they’d be full of ICs (remember them?) and sit in orbit with no human assistance. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/78 "2011-04-05T05:29:24Z")
Galaxy, to pick one sf magazine at random, lasted about 30 years, for about 300 issues, with easily six stories per issue. That’s about 2,000 opportunities to get a prediction right. It’s more surprising that there were so few correct ones, not that there were so many. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 11:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/79 "2011-04-05T11:36:54Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > Heinlein, for instance, speaks about cell phones in Rocketship Gallileo. I’d be really, really surprised if he did. What I expect he did (because he did this in _Space Cadet_) was to put a hand held portable communication device in the hands of one of his characters. And what makes people think it’s a cell phone is that he called that device a telephone and the character was a teenager. None of those constitutes inventing the cell phone. A hand held communication device is not necessarily a cell phone. Portable communication devices had been used in fiction for at least a couple decades before those books were written, although they were usually given some other name, such as the ultraphones in Doc Smith’s _Triplanetary_. Furthermore, the mobile phone was actually invented sometime around when _Space Cadet_ was written. The key idea behind a cell phone is the network of cells that make it possible for thousands of people in a fairly small area to use them at the same time. If someone doesn’t describe that, then they did not predict the cell phone. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/80 "2011-04-05T12:06:27Z")
> [@](#): > > Verne’s prediction of moon travel didn’t include them getting smeared on the floor of the cabin the way they would have been. Wells considered his book more accurate because at least it didn’t violate the laws of nature quite so blatantly (only more subtly.) While warp drive may be nonsensical, it is less so than a story which has the ship accelerate to ftl speeds. One has to conclude that Verne was deliberately fudging the problem of acceleration in his story in order to use straight extrapolation for the rest of it. As Walter James Miller argues in _The Annotated From the Earth to the Moon_, Verne generally did his background science studies pretty well. (Verne wrote not just one sequel to FTETTM, but two. In the second sequel, called _Topsy Turvy_, or sometimes _The Purchase of the North Pole_, he finally admits that one of the effects of realkly big cannon shots doesn’t make any physical sense, and uses that as the significant Plot Point onto which he hangs his story.) So this is a “gimme” that he glosses over in order to get on with the rest of the story. Wells couldn’t have disliked the notion too much, because _he_ has characters shot into space in two of his own works – that’s how the Martian invaders get to Earth in _The War of the Worlds_, after all. But he came back and used the idea again in his 1930s film _Things to Come_, long after it was clear that this was Not a Good Idea, and that people would get smeared into jam, and after he’d criticized Verne for the same thing. And, I might add, after we’d already had a perfectly good movie depicting space flight via rocket, Fritz Lang’s _Die Frau im Mond_. He even has someone giving an impassioned speech about the Space Gun. As an aside, Wells’ anti-gravity sphere wasn’t exactly a new notion. It has been used about a half a dozen times before his relatively late _First Men in the moon_. Cromie’s _A Plunge Into Space_ even uses a spherical craft covered with anti-gravity plates to get to Mars over a decade before Wells’ book. It bears a peculiar introduction supposedly by Jules Verne, which is suspect because a.) Verne didn’t read English; and b.) Verne speaks glowingly of the anti-gravity sphere in the intro, but , years later, criticized wells’ book for using so unscientific a notion. Kurd Lasswitz used anti-gravity devices for _his_ Martian invaders in the book _Zwei Planete_, that came out at the same time as Wells’ _War of the Worlds_. It was an incredibly influential book when it came out, and inspired all those German rocket pioneers, but Lasswitz never got the fame in English that he had in German, and his book has only appeared in an abridged translation in English. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990.md?page=5)