Visionaries who predicted the future

OF ALL the inventor-artists, it was Leonardo Da Vinci who set the bar for what a creative mind could conceive.Leonardo made the first real studies of flight in the 1480s, creating dozens of drawings, with his “ornithopter flying machine”, echoing the design of the modern helicopter.

He also sketched out ideas for what are recognisably a parachute, a repeat-firing machine gun and a submarine.

War of the Worlds author HG Wells was similarly prescient in his vision for the future. Writing in 1914, he anticipated the invention of the atom bomb in The World Set Free.

Wells also came up with the idea of the first recreational war gaming in Floor Games and Little Wars, and is regarded as the father of miniature war gaming.

Sci-fi writer and futurist Arthur C Clarke’s development of the idea of geostationary communications satellites was recognised by scientists who named the fixed range within which telecommunication satellites work as the Clarke Belt.

Meanwhile, sci-fi author William Gibson coined the term and concept “cyber-space” in his 1982 story Burning Chrome, well before the internet.