On Waldoes and Technological Developments:Science Fiction Turns Real
Category: Health, Science & Technology
Via: broliver-thesquirrel-stagnasty • 11 years ago • 9 comments
Last week I was listening to Science Friday on the radio as I was going to Stewarts to get coffee, and they were talking about some new advances in technology from MIT that reminded me of a short story that I had read by Robert Heinlein entitled Waldo . In Waldo , a man develops these gloves that transmit the motions of his hands into devices that can manipulate anything from inhumanly large amounts of steel to cellular level structures.
Here is a link to the Science Friday story and here is a Video on the technology that is called inFORM.
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And here is the Link to the site of the MIT lab Tangible Media Group .
Mesmerizing video ...
Lots of things that were written about in Science Fiction have actually become reality Brolly. In his last book, Grumbles From the Grave, Heinlein quoted a letter he once wrote and said, "My brother, an Army Colonel, always thought that the things I wrote about Atomic warfare were just fantasy, and would never become reality. Then, he flew over Hiroshima and changed his mind".
We can go way back further than that. Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1870. The concepts were preposterous then.
More recently, Dick Tracy started wearing a watch phone in 1946. Now they are available for purchase, even having a camera:
Oh, most definitely! Go back to read some old sci-fi and find lots of things that were wild speculation have become modern fact.
Here are some.
That's a great list, Bro. Actually, I started reading Sci-Fi when I was a pre-teen in the late 1940s, reading the pulp magazines that my older brother bought and collected. I've been a fan ever since.
I started with the hard sci-fi of Asimov, Ben Bova, et al, and then expanded my horizons to include sci-fi/fantasy... There are more books in the world then there is time for me to read them.... damn!
Stories by Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury, Doc Edward E. Smith, Robert Heinlein, A.E.Van Vogt were often first published or serialized in those old mags.
Check out this great site about those mags.
Heinlein's 'Waldo' was published in 1942, by which time his work was already quite popular. When America began developing the atomic bomb, the tech boys developed mechanical 'robot hands' controlled through pressure-sensor gloves, to work with radioactive materials. When the first prototypes were developed, they were named 'waldos' in honor of RAH's story.
Heinlein also outlined the development ofCAD equipment in 1956, in 'The Door Into Summer'...