Technology Predicted by Sci-Fi

"It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced radioactivity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first general use was to replace the steam engine in electrical generating stations."

"It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them.

'Ready!' said the steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter."

"Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionizing the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowlege that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city."

Luke, the three passages quoted above are from a novel published in 1914, not long before the outbreak of the *First* World War. Its title is The World Set Free . Its author, Herbert George Wells.