Closing the gap between science fiction and telephone fact

Those of a certain age may remember the science fiction programmes and books of some fifty years ago with nostalgia. Science fiction writers were basing their guesses of future technology on extrapolations of existing knowledge. In the process, whilst some ideas have still to come to fruition others have already had their time.

Take, for example, the late Isaac Asimov who in his Foundation series set thousands of years in our future predicted the invention of voice activated dictation. Or how about Star Trek, with communicators looking strangely like the flip lid mobiles of today? Voice activated systems, nowadays taken for granted, were playthings of the early Science Fiction writers.

In some ways science needs dreamers to explore ideas and come up with concepts that act as spurs to invention. However, the pace of technological change is such that current developments are far ahead of anything that could logically have been predicted fifty years ago. This is particular true of the latest two announcements on advancements in telephone technology.

The first announcement concerns the development of mobile phone batteries which will recharge themselves from sound waves. This means that the more you use your phone the more you will charge it. Even if you have had a quiet day, you can still charge your phone by listening to music or the television in the evening. The South Korean team behind the invention say that it won’t be long before their initial work on this new area of battery technology heralds fully self charging mobile phones.

We’re not sure how long mobiles will be able to benefit from self charging batteries following the announcement of a “paper” phone which contains all the functionality of a smart phone on a thin piece of paper the size of a credit card. Although final production is still some time away, the inventors at Queen’s University predict that this new phone will do away with Smart phones within the next 5 years.

Whilst these two inventions largely concern mobile telephones it won’t be long before the pace of technology transforms business telephony. Within the last few years we have already seen the advent of virtual switchboards transforming telephone call answering and handling with VoIP enabling international calls for a few pence or even for free. Telephone systems are leading the way in transforming the global economy and that is definitely something that the science fiction writers didn’t predict.