10 Mind-Blowing Predictions from History That Actually Came True

It’s one thing to make a ton of predictions. Anybody can do that. How about this: we predict that we’re going to come across a billion dollars next week. We’ll use it to buy a private island, a private jet, a 15-bedroom mansion, a full staff of servants and waiters, and a fleet of luxury cars. Sounds pretty good, right? But predictions alone are cheap, easy to come by, and ultimately useless if they don’t come true. (Sadly, we won’t hold our breath on that billion-dollar dream.)

No, it’s the predictions that actually do come to fruition that are worth keeping an eye on. And while most prognosticators from the past get more things wrong than right, every now and then, somebody hits the mark so perfectly that their prediction becomes eerily prescient. In this list, we’ll take a look at ten of those cases. Get ready to have your minds blown!

Related: Ten Astonishing Predictions for 2024 from Fiction

10 Organ Transplants (1660s)

Let’s start with a prediction that came three centuries ahead of its time. The first major organ transplant may have occurred in 1954, but the man who is now seen as the father of modern chemistry predicted way back in the 1660s that it would one day be possible. That man was Robert Boyle, and he was one of the foremost scientists of his time. He was so advanced relative to most of his peers, in fact, that he started predicting futuristic medical advances long before anyone else was ever able to dream them up.

In a personal journal written at some point in the middle of the 1660s, Boyle penned a theory that organ transplants could be used to fix sick patients. “The cure of diseases,” Boyle jotted down on paper, could be done “by transplantation.” For what it’s worth, Boyle has also been credited with a host of other predictions, too. He is said to have seen far in advance the development of things like sleeping pills, aspirin, and even LSD. Quick—let’s dig his long-dead body up from the grave and ask him for the next set of Powerball numbers!^[1]

9 Credit Cards (1888)

Have you paid your credit card bill yet this month? If you’re anything like us, you try your damnedest to pay that thing off in full every single month. No sense in letting looming interest hang over your head month after month, right? Unfortunately, not everybody is like that. And even more unfortunately, soothsayers and prognosticators have been anticipating the credit card crunch for a very, very long time. Well, at least one soothsayer has, that is. His name was Edward Bellamy, and in 1888, he wrote a utopian novel called Looking Backward, 2000-1887.

In it, one of Bellamy’s characters, Dr. Leete, explains to another character, Mr. West, a concept that would come around in the future, revolving around using credit cards rather than cash to purchase things. Bellamy was very specific, too—he actually coined the term “credit card” in the book.

He wrote this coming from Dr. Leete’s mouth in the novel: “A credit corresponding to his share of the annual product of the nation is given to every citizen… and a credit card issued him with which he procures at the public storehouses, whatever he desires.” Sounds like credit cards (and credit card debt) to us!^[2]

8 The iPad (1968)

The iPad may be part of the modern world just like any other piece of technology, but it was predicted long ago. Back in 1968, novelist Arthur C. Clark wrote the iconic book 2001: A Space Odyssey. That science-fiction work is notable for a lot of reasons. However, for our purposes here, it’s most incredible because it predicted the coming use of the iPad—42 years before Apple hit the market with the groundbreaking product. Clark even (nearly) coined the name that Steve Jobs’ company would come to use for it. In his novel, Arthur called it the “newspad” and described it just as it came to be.

In that 1968 novel, Clark wrote: “[The book’s character Floyd] would plug his foolscap-size Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. The postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.” He even got apps and those Apple app icons right when it came to “the postage-stamp-size rectangle” on the iPad’s screen. Incredible!^[3]

7 The 1666 London Fire (1500s)

During his lifetime, the French apothecary Nostradamus was very fond of publishing collections of prophecies. He produced several of them in the middle decades of the 16th century before his death in 1566. And there are so many predictions written down therein—and many of those predictions are so unbelievably broadly written—that it’s tough to give him too much credit for getting things “right.” After all, taken cynically, it’s a bit like astrology. If you generalize just enough, you can make any “prediction” seem accurate, right?

However, there is one Nostradamus prediction that absolutely hit the proverbial nail on the head: his prophecy of the Great Fire of London. That devastating fire occurred exactly a century after the Frenchman’s death in 1666. In his publication foreseeing it, Nostradamus shies away from ambiguous language in this instance. Instead, he chooses to get very specific—and very chilling with his eventual accuracy.

Read the prediction for yourself and just try to tell us that he wasn’t entirely accurate: “The blood of the just will be lacking in London / Burnt up in the fire of ’66 / The ancient Lady will topple from her high place / Many of the same sect will be killed.” He got the city right—and the year, too. Oh, and as if that’s not enough, there’s also this: Henrietta Maria, the embattled wife of the controversial King Charles I of England, died in 1666. Could that be the “ancient Lady” who Nostradamus said would “topple from her high place”?^[4]

6 President Obama (1968)

Author John Brunner wrote a science-fiction novel back in 1968 called Stand on Zanzibar. It’s a strange book, even as far as sci-fi novels are concerned. And even though it achieved some level of popularity after it was published at the end of the tumultuous 1960s, it would have likely been completely forgotten to the ravages of time… except that it correctly predicted the presidency of Barack Obama.

In a Nostradamus-like claim that ended up coming true exactly as he foresaw it, Brunner inserted a “President Obomi” into his 1968 tome. In that book, Brunner noted that this “President Obomi” would be the one running the United States of America in 2010. The real “Obomi,” who, of course, is Barack Obama, ended up being elected to the presidency for two full terms after his historic 2008 campaign. How’s that for being on point?^[5]

5 Earbuds (1953)

The year was 1953, and author Ray Bradbury was coming into his own as one of the best science-fiction writers of all time. That year, he wrote the iconic novel Fahrenheit 451 and changed the way we view the world—and the future—forever. However, among the many key passages and themes found in that book, one major idea stands out: earbuds. Yes, earbuds! Bradbury predicted the use of earbuds, which have become so commonplace in our modern society, nearly seven decades before they popped up absolutely everywhere.

In one particularly poetic section of the novel, Bradbury wrote: “And in her ears, the little seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.” Crazy how he could have foreseen that we’d all be wearing earbuds when going out and about in the world. And equally crazy how he rightly thought about the possible anti-social tendencies born out of that habit…^[6]

4 Blogging & Tweeting (1835)

There was a Russian prince named Vladimir Odoevsky who lived in the early 1800s. He loved to write, and in 1835, he wrote a novel called Year 4338. Throughout that book, Odoevsky used the pages to describe his thoughts on what he felt the world would become in, well, the year 4338. Among all of the many predictions he made as part of that novel, though, one big one stands out: He successfully figured out that people would one day communicate by instant messaging. So things like blogging and tweeting—mainstays that have come part and parcel with the modern world—were on his radar almost 200 years ago.

At one point in the book, Odoevsky wrote a passage about how humans in the year 4338 were able to update others on their status and thoughts instantaneously. Doesn’t that sound like Twitter (er, X) to you? Not only that, but he also wrote in the novel about how future humans would share their lives and thoughts in longer-form communications that could be read by their friends and family. Sort of a journal or diary instantaneously made available for everyone to read. Sort of like… blogging. Cool, right?

Here’s the thing, though: Odoevsky made those predictions more than a decade before the telegraph was invented. So he had literally no clue that there could be any kind of long-range messaging system that might quickly turn his dreams into reality. No, instead, he predicted instant messaging without any clue about what was quickly coming down the pipeline. Obviously, that made it all even that much more impressive!^[7]

3 A Man on the Moon (1865)

Back in 1865, Jules Verne was the first person to imagine putting a man on the moon. Think about that: while the Civil War was still raging on in the United States, and people were dying from gangrene and every other horrible condition in that bloody conflict, Verne was thinking about going to the moon. And even more than that, the book he wrote about that trip up into space turned out to be remarkably prescient for how Neil Armstrong’s first steps onto our lovely little lunar shadow turned out to be.

That year, Verne wrote a novel called From Earth to the Moon. In it, he shared a made-up story about two men who get strapped into a projectile and fired from a cannon high up into the sky. Sound familiar? More than a century before Armstrong’s “one giant step for mankind,” Verne had it all plotted out in his head. Oh, and as if that’s not enough, there’s also this: The author set his novel’s rocket launch in Florida… the future home site of the Kennedy Space Center. Eerie!^[8]

2 Wi-Fi & Cell Phones (1909)

Well, over six decades before the first cell phone was even thought up as a concept, and more than nine decades before the introduction of wireless internet, Nikola Tesla predicted that both of them would come to fruition. Tesla, of course, was one of the most gifted electrical engineers to ever live—and also Thomas Edison’s right-hand man for a while. So, his opinions about the future of technology back at the turn of the 20th century carried more weight than those of the Average Joe. But still, the fact that he was able to predict both cell phones and Wi-Fi so far in advance is objectively stunning.

In 1909, while speaking to the New York Times, Tesla dropped both predictions in one single sentence. Yes, you read that right. “It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world so simply that any individual can carry and operate his own apparatus,” Tesla told the paper of record when they asked him about what the future might hold as far as communication and connection were concerned. And just like that, he blew our minds! How about that for predictive ability AND brevity?^[9]

1 Mark Twain’s Death (1909)

Well, why don’t we end this otherwise fascinating list on a bit of a downer? In 1909, Mark Twain predicted his own death. We don’t mean that in the general sense. Sure, we could all “predict” our own death by saying that we’ll die one day. (Great job there, Nostradamus! You really nailed that one!) In Mark Twain’s case, though, he predicted the exact day of his death more than a year in advance of it happening—and even pegged his future passing to a very specific atmospheric event to boot!

As many of you may well know, Twain was born in 1835, right as Halley’s comet was cresting across the sky. He was very proud (and aware) of the significance of that event during his lifetime. So, in 1909, he had it on his mind when his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine chatted Twain up about death and the afterlife.

To that end, Paine quoted Twain as saying: “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t. The Almighty said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” Sure enough, just like he’d predicted (and hoped), Twain died on April 21, 1910—not even 24 hours after Halley’s comet returned to the sky above.^[10]