#2 Television
Although largely forgotten today, one of the most influential science fiction stories of its time was Ralph 124C41+, a 1911 novel written by Hugo Gernsbeck, the man who popularized the term science fiction.
It’s a 27th Century love story in which the protagonist (Ralph) saves a woman’s life and falls in love with her while dealing with the advanced technological wonders and challenges of his era (the title refers to the main character and the code represents the words “one to foresee for one another.”)
While not recognized for brilliant prose, it is feted for an inordinate amount of correctly predicted and painstakingly described future technologies, most prominently the “tele-theater,” home entertainment viewing device we would come to call television. In the story, the author also describes remote controls and channel surfing.
Within a decade, the first primitive broadcast images were being beamed from the World’s Fair and other technology conferences.
New Jersey's Role
Many breakthrough milestones for television occurred in New Jersey, thanks to the country’s most prestigious R&D facility of its type at the time, the RCA Labs in Princeton. New Jersey’s Bell Laboratories devised the first broadcast technology and demonstrated it from Whippany to New York City in 1927.
#3 Nuclear Power
Physicists turned the late 19th century into a golden age with the discovery of the atom and its potential as an unlimited power source.
Author H.G. Wells was worried enough about the idea of unlimited power that he penned an apocryphal novel “The World Set Free” in 1914 in which atomic weapons were described for the first time.
“A man could carry in a handbag an amount of energy sufficient to wreck half a city,” Wells wrote, also observing “these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world were strange even to the men who used them.”
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard frequently mentioned Wells’ story as an inspiration after he developed the idea of the nuclear chain reaction process that unlocked the power of the atom.
New Jersey's Role
Albert Einstein was the godfather of nuclear power as a result of his Theory of Relativity. He worked at Princeton University for over 20 years and brought to New Jersey many of the greatest minds of his generation, including Szilard.
#4 Rockets
There is no more popular theme in science fiction than humans visiting other worlds or aliens visiting Earth.
H. G. Wells’ 1898 masterpiece The War of The World’s had Martians invading Earth, and it inspired a Worcester, Massachusetts teenager to dream about how humans could visit other worlds.
“It gripped my imagination tremendously,” Robert Goddard would remember after becoming the most influential man in the history of the U.S. space program.
In the 1920’s, he advocated space travel to a skeptical nation. Then he developed the first liquid fueled rocket in 1926 and later the important multi-stage rocket design.
Less than half a decade later, humans walked on the surface of the moon.
New Jersey's Role
New Jersey contributed greatly to the space program. Montclair's Buzz Aldrin became the second man to walk on the moon and Hackensack's Wally Schirra was one of the original seven Mercury astronauts. Orange's Beatrice Hicks, the first woman engineer hired by Western Electric (1939), designed a gas density switch utilized by NASA on the Apollo moon missions.
#5 Satellites
“An artificial satellite at the correct distance from Earth could give television and microwave coverage to the whole planet.” So predicted one of sci-fi’s most prolific authors, Arthur C. Clarke, in 1945 when rocketry was still more science fiction than fact.
Today, as Clarke envisioned, hundreds of artificial satellites float around Earth providing everything from television signals to GPS service to photos of the outermost reaches of the cosmos.
For his vision, the International Astronomical Union honored Clarke by naming the geostationary band of orbit above the surface of the Earth (22,000 miles) the Clarke Orbit.
New Jersey's Role
John Piece of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey wrote a paper showing how Clarke's vision of satellites could become reality.
That led to Bell Labs partnering with NASA to create TelStar, a 170 pound satellite launched on July 10, 1962. Later that day, humans for the first time saw a visual that had been transmitted from the ground into space and back to ground again. It was the image of an American flag waving in front of Earth Station in Andover, Maine.
#6 Cell Phones
Every time Dick Tracy made a call on his “two-way wrist radio” or Captain James T. Kirk flipped open his communicator, they were bringing us one step closer to the reality of untethered communications.
Tracy and Kirk’s “anytime, anywhere communication” made an impression on a young engineer named Martin Cooper, who would become the “father of the cell phone” while working for Motorola in the 1970s.
He was the lead inventor on the patent for “radio telephone systems” in 1973 and designed the first cell phones (which weighed over four pounds). Later that year, he made the first cell phone call as part of a demonstration in New York City.
The first commercially-available cell phones were released in 1983, and since then over seven billion subscribers have signed up for service.
New Jersey's Role
Bell Laboratories in New Jersey introduced the concept of cellular communications in 1947 and later designed cellular communications networks. The Bell Systems rolled out the first wireless phones which used VHF radio signals to connect to the traditional wired telephone network.
#7 Robots
The modern concept of robots came from a 1921 play by a Czech writer who coined the term “robata” which roughly translates to “servitude” or “forced labor.”
Since then, robots have been portrayed as everything from coldly calculating (HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey), servile (Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet), cute (R2D2), sophisticated (Data in Star Trek), wisecracking (Rosie the Robot on the Jetsons), and relentless (The Terminator).
In literature, Isaac Asimov’s classic “I, Robot” created the “Three Laws of Robotics” and Martin Caiden’s 1972 novel “Cyborg” introduced bionics and inspired the hit television series The Six Million Dollar Man.
Bossa Nova Robotics of Pittsburgh, a commercial spinoff of Carnegie Melon University’s robotics program, says Rosie is the model for its upcoming personal service robots.
New Jersey's Role
Unimate, the first digitally operated and programmable robot, made its debut at a General Motors plant in Trenton in 1961 where it would lift and stack extremely hot pieces of metal.
#8 Driverless Car
Drivers are about to become an endangered species.
The self-driving vehicles common in movies such as Total Recall, Minority Report and I, Robot will soon become a staple of the world’s roadways.
Industry experts believe they will be commonplace on the road in twenty years.Autonomous model cars are being built and tested by Google and major car manufacturers such as Audi and GM. Nissan predicts it will sell driverless cars by 2018. Tesla and most major car manufacturers are expected to join in within two years of that.
New Jersey's Role
Princeton University's Autonomous Vehicle Engineering group consists of faculty and undergraduate students who are researching and designing driverless cars.
Fort Monmouth is considered a research center and testing ground for driverless vehicles.
#9 Virtual Reality
During the Great Depression, Stanley G. Weinbaum wrote a story about a professor who invents Pygmalion's Spectacles, a pair of goggles that allowed a user to "become part of the story, right down to the sights, sounds and smells; you speak to the characters and they reply. The story is all about you and you are in it."
Movies such as The Lawnmower Man, Brainstorm, and most especially, The Matrix take the concept of virtual reality further.
Today virtual reality is becoming, well, reality.
Facebook recently plunked down $2 billion to buy Oculus Rift, a pioneering company in the development of headgear and software for virtual reality gaming.
But virtual reality does more than support games. It allows NASA's Rovers to see Mars more precisely, surgeons to hone their skills more effectively, and doctors to examine patients more thoroughly.
New Jersey's Role
The Rowan University Technology Park in Mullica Hill is fast becoming a world leading 3-D Virtual Reality Center. It is currently creating real-world programs for hospitals, civil engineering firms, NASA and other government agencies.
#10 Laser
In 1897, H.G. Wells unleashed an army of Martians on an unprepared Earth in The War of The Worlds. The Red Planet invaders devastated Earth by using a weapon that concentrated energy into a single beam called a "heat ray," described in the book as an "invisible sword of fire that destroyed all it touched."
Fifty years later, Earthlings caught up to their fictional Martian adversaries by learning to energize atoms in a way that released the formidable power of light in a single, concentrated beam. The process became known as "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation" – or LASER.
Today, lasers do everything from scanning barcodes to carrying cable TV signals to enabling almost miraculous surgical repairs.
New Jersey's Role
Charles Hard Townes and Arthur Schawlow, two researchers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, proposed a method of amplifying light in 1958. They were awarded a patent for the ensuing optical device in 1960. While their original intent was to create a better way to study molecular structures, their innovation instead spawned new multi-billion dollar industries.
#11 Bionics
In his 1972 novel Cyborg, Martin Caiden tells the story of test pilot Steve Austin who is horribly mutilated in a plane crash, only to be fully restored by bionics – the replacement of human body parts with mechanical prosthetics.
The novel was the inspiration for the hugely popular television series The Six Million Dollar Man.
Today, researchers have developed new software, longer lasting batteries, and improved microprocessors that are bringing us closer to creating the first real Steve Austin.
A recent breakthrough is "targeted reinnervation" a surgical procedure that transfers existing nerves in an amputee's body to the area of the residual limb and prosthetic, thereby allowing the amputee to control the artificial limb with brain signals.
New Jersey's Role
Recently, Dr. Raymond Iezzi, a native of Mountainside and a Rutgers graduate, made headlines when he successfully implanted a bionic eye in a blind patient. Iezzi first implanted a chip with 60 electrodes into the patient's retina, then created glasses with a small camera that transmits optical images wirelessly, allowing the patient to see images.
#12 Tablets
The concept of tablets or portable computers was first widely seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey as the astronauts hurtling towards Jupiter used “newspads” – small rectangular screens – to watch the news back home.
Fifty years later, when Apple sued Samsung over patent infringements regarding its tablet device, part of Samsung’s defense was that the tablet design was already established as “prior art” and cited this scene in 2001.
Portable computers were also a staple of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Called Personal Access Display Devices (PADDs) in the show, these devices were created by the show’s prop department when budget cuts forced them to find cheaper alternatives to full-fledged computers.
Ironically, the special effects shown on the PADDs would have been much easier and cheaper to create had the special effects department had access to the hardware and software it predicted.
New Jersey's Role
New Jersey-based AT&T introduced one of the first commercially available tablets in 1991 called the EO Personal Communicator. Its R&D arm, Bell Laboratories made countless contributions to the development of computer hardware and software design.
#13 Submarine
Jules Verne's famous work 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea described the adventures of an enigmatic Captain Nemo and his self-powered undersea vessel, the Nautilus, decades before submarines became commonplace.
Verne's vivid description of the Nautilus made a life-long impression on the young Simon Lake who would grow up to become "Father of the Modern Submarine."
This aptly named innovator earned more than 200 patents for submarine design and technology, and when Lake built his first successful prototype, he received a congratulatory telegram from Verne himself.
Recognizing his contributions, the U.S. Navy commissioned the Simon Lake class of submarine tender boats from 1964 through 1999.
New Jersey's Role
The submarine is intricately tied to New Jersey.
John Phillip Holland built the first submarine for the U.S. Navy at the Crescent Shipyard in Elizabeth.
Simon Lake, born in Pleasantville, N.J., in 1866 and attended high school in Toms River, built and tested many of his first generation boats in the waters of Atlantic City and Sandy Hook.
#14 TASER
During the 20th century, a series of popular books featured a teenage genius named Tom Swift who battled villains with an array of his own scientific innovations including photo telephones, diving seacopters and flying submarines.
Among those who cited Tom Swift as career inspiring were Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and a NASA nuclear physicist named John Higson Cover, Jr.
In the early 1970s, Cover invented a non-lethal stun gun for law enforcement which delivered doses of electroshock via two dart-like electrodes shot from the weapon.
Honoring his boyhood inspiration, Cover named the device the Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle.
Today we simply use its acronym - TASER.
New Jersey's Role
Elizabeth New Jersey native Edward L. Stratemeyer created and wrote the Tom Swift series of novels, as well as other juvenile fiction mainstays the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Rover Boys and the Bobbsey Twins. In total he wrote over 1,300 books and sold more than 500 million copies. Upon his death in 1930, Fortune Magazine wrote in tribute "As oil had its Rockefeller, literature had its Stratemeyer."
#15 "Plugged-in" Society
In his classic 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, author Ray Bradbury described a "plugged-in" society mesmerized by a cacophony of entertainment options courtesy of a totalitarian state eager to keep them distracted and unthinking.
The people in Bradbury's novel were addicted to programming on large, flat-screen televisions, and the wave of sounds coming from "thimble radios" – seashell-shaped devices for the ear that today we call earbuds.
Bradbury also described a population with an ever-shortening attention span whose preferred method of communication was through what Bradbury called a "digital wall."
Decades later, Facebook would use this exact terminology in describing itself and what it does.
New Jersey's Role
Television was nurtured in New Jersey, mostly by David Sarnoff, the "Father of Broadcasting." He established the RCA Labs in Princeton where pioneering technical work was done by Vladimir Zworykin and others. Further north, in Montclair, television programming was pioneered by Alan Dumont who created the Dumont Television Network. Both were responsible for breakthroughs in radio as well.