Jules Verne

Three of his novels contain incredible insights into the future trajectory of mechanical science:

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
  • Mostly-accurately describes how submarines would work
  • Including how they expel air to sink
  • And how they decompress air to rise
  • And how they refill their compressed air tanks while surfaced
  • And how they use giant rotating "fans" to move forward and backward
  • Mostly-accurately describes the flora and fauna of sea animals in various parts of the world
  • Bonus: great characters, motivations, and plot
• Robur the Conqueror
  • Accurately describes three methods for controlled flight before the invention of airplanes
  • Accurately describes the principles of operation of gas-filled aircraft like airships and hot-air balloons (but this is not surprising because they were a regular part of scientific experiments in Verne's time)
  • Accurately describes how rotational motion induces lift (if the motor is placed horizontally) and can be used to design helicopters
  • Accurately describes how an airfoil induces lift when air is passed over it and can be used to design airplanes
• From the Earth to the Moon
  • Accurately predicts that American space exploration would begin with launch facilities in Florida and Texas
  • Accurately explains why, namely, because Earth's rotation can assist with the launch and this rotation is relatively faster in the south
  • Accurately describes the quantity of propellant needed to get a spacecraft to leave earth's pull
  • Accurately describes the effects of gravity reduction as the ship leaves earth's pull

It wasn't just that Jules Verne imagined the future. He figured out how his mental inventions could work in reality, with mechanical descriptions and sometimes precise instrumentation. In many cases he described potential future equipment and technology in great detail, including mathematical formulae for how much lift could be generated by a submarine or an airfoil or an explosion, including environmental factors as influences on his calculations, and the stuff he described often came to fruition.

Basically, he was doing "hard science fiction" over a hundred years before it was cool. Or anyway he tried. He was also not always super careful, and drew about as many "wrong" inferences as right ones. But when he was right, his precision astounds me.