"[,,,] radio-powered roller skates"

From: leemaslibros

"Sci-fi writers have been predicting the future for centuries. Jules Verne was describing rocket ships and submarines before these vehicles of exploration even existed. Although we don't delve into the ocean's depths inside of 'a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale,' his prediction, while distorted, more or less came true.

     This presents a 'chicken or the egg?' sort of question: Do writers simply notice the direction a cultural phenomenon is heading in, or do their ideas inspire cultural and technological change? In some cases, a fiction writer's imagination serves as a sort of catalyst for new technologies. But sometimes, like with Edward Belamy's lost classic Looking Backwards, it's difficult to say whether or not the author had anything to do with the eventual inventions.
     Here are 7 sci-fi predictions that came true:"
— Huffington Post

From: davidszondy

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"A day at the office in 1972 as seen from 1922. We've got your radio-controlled planes, your radio-controlled ships, radio-powered heaters, radio-powered clock, radio-powered roller skates (roller skates?), and your gigantic and very terrifying power-transmitting radio tower. Do you have a feeling that radio was going to be a big thing in the future?
     Take a look at the man's work station. On the right you have a radiophone/television set for talking to the wife and kids. The globe on the right isn't ornamental, it's the future's version of a switchboard/yellow pages. Stick the pin in the globe and hope your hand is steady enough so you get New York instead of Jersey City. To the left is the radio business controller. We use our desktop marvels to make spreadsheets, play freecell, and download porn. This chap is using his to do everything up to and including unloading a ship by remote control. How does he manage this feat of science? Apparently courtesy of two very large rheostats.
   Whatever happened to those huge open-faced rheostats with the bare copper connectors? Technology just hasn't been the same since they went out of fashion."
— Davidszondy
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Back to the Future

From: Live Auctioneers

"One late-autumn afternoon I walked from the 7th down the Blvd. St.-Germain to the Librairie in the 5th, on the other side of the Boul Mich’, in the old Latin Quarter, at the foot of Notre Dame. The windows were dusty, the interior dark, there was no indication that the store was open.
     But the door was unlocked.
     I was greeted by an older man in a tweed jacket and a knit scarf. 'Greeted', perhaps, is not the right word. He acknowledged my presence with a small nod while I gazed — in rapture, in wonderment — at book after book after book. There were hundreds of them. All extraordinary. All by Jules Verne."
— Howard A. Rodman,  Los Angeles Review of Books
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