3. Vest Pocket Telephone
On the 29th April, 1906, the New York World ran a story about one Charles E. Alden of New York who had "solved the problem of wireless telephoning and the result is so simple that is likely to create a sensation". It was a tiny stub of a story, hidden in the middle of the paper, and yet it seemed to be announcing the mobile phone some 67 years before Motorola first demonstrated theirs. The phone was reportedly "so small that it can be put into a vest pocket" and was apparently powered by a "wireless battery such as is used by the Marconi system". It supposedly worked by remotely hacking into telephone wires, so more of a spying device than a smartphone, but Alden also envisaged a functionality for sending calls too. It's not entirely certain why Alden's mobile phone didn't take off. There are some conspiracy theorists that put forwards the idea that he was actually a time traveller, and decided to stop off in Edwardian New York to troll everyone for a bit before slipping back into the 4th dimension. Alternatively, he might have been telling porkies. Whether or not Alden's claims were slightly, er, exaggerated, is clearly demonstrates that the idea of the mobile phone was in people's heads for at least three quarters of a century before it came to fruition. Just imagine a world in which we had gotten to wireless communication that much earlier, where would our technology be now? We can only speculate.