Nikola Tesla predicted mobile phones in 1909
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"The attention of the world has been caught and held by the wireless telegraph, and yet this is a very primitive use of the the art. So far only electric waves have been used, which have been quickly damped out in their passage through the air. It is possible, however, to transmit electric currents of enormous power for thousands of miles without demising their energy."
Too bad he got screwed by Edison & company. I think the world would have looked a lot more different if Tesla had finished his work on wireless transfer of electricity.
Nikola Tesla is viewed as one of the co-inventors and pioneers of radio and this article clearly shows his vision and how far ahead he was of his time ( check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio ).
"Using a global array of these magnifying transmitters, it was Tesla's plan to establish what he called the "World System", providing multi-channel global broadcasting, an array of secure wireless telecommunications services, and a long range aid to navigation, including means for the precise synchronization of clocks. In a more highly developed state he envisioned the World System would expand to include the wireless industrial transmission of electric power."
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_tower - his unfinished project intended for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony, broadcasting, and to demonstrate the transmission of power without interconnecting wires.
I don't really think we can imagine what world Tesla saw or what solution he had in mind, but it's clear for us now that Tesla was correct in many of his assumptions regarding the Wardenclyffe tower, e.g.:
"Despite the ridicule he has been subjected to by scientists for many years, many of Tesla's ideas are being demonstrated to be essentially correct. For example he correctly predicted the existence of the ionosphere and electrical resonance of the Earth-atmosphere system. Resonance of the earth-ionosphere cavity with a fundamental frequency in the vicinity of 7.3 Hz was demonstrated in the 1950s as the Schumann resonance[37]. The latter phenomenon was named after Schumann, for although Tesla had detected a resonance of the Earth-atmosphere system, he was not taken seriously in his time.[38] Furthermore, Tesla appears to have excited a different terrestrial resonance mode with a fundamental frequency of 11.78 Hz."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elected_or_appointed_fe...
Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_control#History or 300 of his other inventions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_patents
(Some excuses may be made on the grounds of story flow and building a comprehensible universe, but that's weak sci-fi).
By contrast, it's visionary to be able to understand the full implications of a new technology that disrupts the environment in which we formed our ideas. In Tesla's case, not only did he understand the implications of that technology, but he actually invented much of the technology himself.
It would be no less remarkable if Gutenberg invented the printing press and then used it to print tracts explaining how his press was going to undermine the Catholic Church's monopoly gatekeeper status and launch an explosion in the rate and density of accumulated human knowledge.
Station-to-station would indeed require transmission without loss, and power loss for a transmitter is roughly equivalent to the cube of the distance for an omni-directional antenna.
That doesn't diminish the power of this vision, but even Tesla had to abide by the laws of physics.
One 'Nathan B. Stubblefield' apparently holds a 1908 patent on a wireless telephone: http://www.google.com/patents?q=887357
Also he didn't think of packet radio. But though extremely helpful, I'm not sure that it's absolutely necessary.
Still, a big difference between this forecast and the present state of mobile wireless is that Tesla probably expected the subscribers' handset to draw power from the microwave transmissions themselves, rather than from batteries.
When I was about 5, I predicted the iPhone.
Well not exactly the iPhone, but I made a lot of drawings of a device with phone, computer with touchscreen, music player, etc., in roughly the iPhone form factor. Since I am very old, mobile phones at the time were back-breakingly huge, and I had not ever seen a touchscreen.
My "design" was a bit different, though. I though it would look cool to carry the device like a giant Dick Tracy-ish watch. And it needed a very small cassette-tape memory for the computer (that was the only kind I had seen).
I also made a lot of drawings of cars with jet motors. That particular vision has not worked out very well. Yet.
Thrust =2,450 lbs aprox 3,800 horsepower + after burner another 1200 horsepower
Or perhaps this, ever so slightly more practical, one: http://www.ronpatrickstuff.com
There were mobile phones when you were young. You are not old.
"In 1910 Lars Magnus Ericsson installed a telephone in his car, although this was not a radio telephone. While travelling across the country, he would stop at a place where telephone lines were accessible and using a pair of long electric wires he could connect to the national telephone network."
Apparently he also predicted botnets...
He's generally forgotten (by the public) compared to Edison when his contribution was probably greater.
Tesla didn't help matters with the way he conducted (pun definitely not intended) himself and some of the experiments he did.
But I'll bet there isn't a scientist that wouldn't give up a significant amount of money to get their hands on that classified notebook just in case there is some hidden gem in there.
In the later years after both their deaths many people (questioned) believed Edison had pioneered AC current (and as a result was responsible for the consumer electricity market) - none had really heard of Westinghouse/Tesla.
When asked what comes after his discovery that Maxwell's radio waves exist, he replied 'Nothing, I guess'.