The earliest forms of chemotherapy were largely unexpected technologies, because they were derived from mustard gas. Microwave cooking started because one of the engineers working with communication microwaves noticed that some M&Ms he had left in a certain area were melted. Silly putty was a product of an failed experiment in making non-rubber plant rubber during WWII when the trade paths to get rubber for war machinery was blocked by Japan.

The discovery of Flores Man was a real stunner.

The recent discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating was quite a shocker.

The theory of using a computer to augment human cognitive and communication capabilities had been floating around for a decade, and time-sharing computers had given a few people a hint of that things were happening in that direction, but few in computerdom in 1968 were expecting anything full-blown emerging along those lines for a couple of decades. Hence Doug Englebart's 12/9/68 presentation to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in SF was a mind-blower. Here's what M. Mitchell Waldrop wrote, in "The Dream Machine," pp. 290-91:

Engelbart then showed the audience the mouse ... word-wrap, cut-and-paste, outlining, and hypertext. ... He demonstrated on-screen windows, ... on-line collaboration, ... an on-line user manual, an on-line project-planning system, even a kind of prototype E-mail system--on and on."

And here's how John Markoff described it in "What the Dormouse Said" (2005), pp. 148-50:

"Doug Engelbart sat under a twenty-two-foot-high computer screen 'dealing lightning with both hands' ... demonstrating a system that seemed like science fiction to a generation reared on punched cards. ... He showed how it was possible to edit text on a display screen, to make hypertext links from one electronic document to another, and to mix text and graphics, and even video and graphics. He also sketched out ... ARPAnet .... In short, every significant aspect of today's computing world was revealed in a magnificent hour and a half.

"For many who witnessed it, it was more than a bolt from the blue: It was a religious experience. ... Years later, his talk remained 'the mother of all demos.' ... 'Fantastic World of Tomorrow's Computer' was the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Engelbart's system kept the 'man in the loop,' which was antithetical to the goals of many computer scientists of the era. Engelbart was a heretic, and it was from his heresy that personal computing grew."

M. Mitchell Waldrop wrote, in his 2001 book "Dream Machine," p. 93:

"The spring and summer of 1948 did not lack for headlines. ... And on June 30, Bell Labs announced ... something called a transistor.

"And yet even in the midst of all that, Claude Shannon's long-delayed opus on information theory exploded like a bomb. His analysis of communication was breathtaking in scope, masterful in execution--and, for most people, totally unexpected. 'It was like a bolt out of the blue, a really unique thing,' recalls his Bell Labs colleague John Pierce. 'I don't know of any other theory that came in a complete form like that, with very few antecedents or history.'

"'It was a revelation,' agrees Oliver Selfridge. 'Around MIT the reaction was, "Brilliant! Why didn't I think of that?" Information theory gave us a whole conceptual vocabulary, as well as a technical vocabulary.'
..............

"Shannon's fellow mathematicians were enthralled. 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' had created a whole new domain of applied mathematics at a stroke, and suddenly there were a million questions to play with."

I have one for you, not so much an unpredicted technology more an underutilized one... I'm talking about pen-drives, those teeny tiny 256mb upward to, gosh, 5gb at the moment I think. I've just come across really cheap ones, 5 pounds (9 dollars) for 1gb of storage and it is amazingly useful. For what you might think, well, swapping files easily, carrying round massive amounts of data, either books to read, music to listen to or even games to play. One of its greatest attributes is the fact that its potential has not even been fully realised yet, I've been reading about these PCs that have no hard drive and use freeware only, essentially just machines for accesing the internet and using programms as are available, by adding a few USB ports to the device it means that you have a fully portable series of HDs to take with you anywhere.. may sound lame to others but as a 40 year old geek(ish) bloke it blows me away being able to carry around sooooo much stuff in such a small package and have it being so user friendly. For me the WOW factor doesn't come much bigger. Might be fun for some people to post a few of their ideas on what this increasingly cheap technology might offer for the future.

AZT, zidovudine was a failed anticancer drug first synthesized in 1964 but not approved to treat the as yet unknown human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) until 1987. For twenty three years it waited. That's a long time for a failed drug.

Jamie Uhrig

Somewhat related: the affordability and portability of computers and specifically spell checkers have allowed entire generations to not have to learn to write or spell. I've read emails from top executives and 'industry leaders' with appalling spelling and grammar. You wouldn't know that if you read their quotes or articles in newspapers or magazines.

some chemical variation of what is basically super glue also doubled as a first aid utility in viet nam, where it instantly sealed wounds and prevented bleeding to death. I am not sure what the chemical was intended to do first though, seal wounds, or stick things together, though i imagine it is the latter.

I humbly would add Stigmergic Systems to the new unpredicted technologies!

Biological systems have evolved ingenious solutions to the same kind of problems encountered in information technology.

Understanding how nature solves these problems allows us to use these solutions ourselves, to create highly efficient solutions in a stigmergic manner.

According to Peter Small, stigmergy is not like a product, a service or an application, it isn't even like a computer program, it is a very clever strategy used by nature to get colonies of insects to self-organize, tell each other where to find food, create sophisticated messaging systems and build complex architectural structures.

The development of fiber optics for telecom was accelerated by the availability of really good understanding of semiconductor purification and doping. If it were not for the high-purity manufacturing techniques that came from semiconductor refining, the glass could not be made pure enough to control its attenuation and other characteristics by adding dopants. Prior to the development of single-mode fiber, the useful range for (unamplified) fiber optic comm was a kilometer or two. Now the lab folks can demonstrate 10 million kilometer data path through single-mode fiber.

the MRI -

Often is the case that a product is a by product of the process of developing a solution to a problem. The microwave oven at Raytheon is such an example.

I have to agree with Alex that cellular switching, or cells-as-computers was an idea born almost as soon as computers were born. The early cybernetics began talking about such things as they were inventing the ingredients of electronic computers in the late 1940s, and early 50s.

There is significant lag between a hard-to-believe fantasy story about a technology and when everyone has it. Cell phones were imagined long before they happen, and almost up until the day before they happened they seemed likely but improable soon. The next day they were seen as inevitable. Ditto for the web which seemed certain at some future point, but was a surprise in 1993.

Just to provide some evidence for my above blustery contention that thinking of cellular signaling components as logical elements or circuits is old hat:

"To Monod and Jacob the 'freedom' derived from allostery meant that appropriate interactions between mechanistically simple [cellular] regulatory elements could suffice to build any sort of regulatory circuit, of any required degree of complexity -- ranging from coordinated responses of cells to hormones to development and differentiation. A bold and exciting prospect then [circa 1962], which raises a disquieting question now: What do we know about [cellular] signaling now [c.1988] that is really new? In many ways, our exciting new experiments substantiate theories already articulated a quarter of a century ago. Although derived from sparse and occasionally irrelevant data, the mechanisms enumerated in 1961 include all the examples of signal transduction we understand in 1988."

-H. Bourne, Cold Spring Harbor Symposia in Quantitative Biology, Volume 53, pp. 1019-1031.

I'm a bit late to the discussion, but I thought I'd add the Cellular Phone to the list. Of course, the idea of a hand-held communitcator existed (Dick Tracy's watch, Star Trek Communicators) but they tended to be more walkie-talkie-like. If you suggested to someone in 1980 that in 20 years everyone would carry a phone smaller than a deck of cards in their pocket for use almost anywhere and capable of calling any phone number in the world , I think they would have laughed.

The use of cellular circuitry do computation is hardly unexpected!

As a biochemist, I find the current rounds of studies to be very interesting, and potentially useful, but not at all surprising. In fact my undergraduate thesis, written in 1992, extensively discusses the cell-as-computer metaphor, and the analysis and manipulation of cell signaling components as logical devices. And that document was neither terribly original nor especially penetrating for its time. We've known that cellular components can execute not, and, nand and other logical operations at least since the pioneering work of Jacob, Monod, and their colleagues in the 1950s. Ptashne's very good book, _A Genetic Switch_, describes in detail the history of one important switching system, used by the lambda phage to decide whether to replicate, and thereby destroy its host, or to sit tight.

So the current manipulations of these technologies strike me as rather predictable (I am not saying nontrivial) incremental advances built upon basic science that's been done in molecular genetics and cell biology for decades.

PCR, reverse transcriptase, prions, RNAi, RNA splicing, ribozymes, an dindeed the original discovery that protein kinases are signaling devices (by Krebs and Fischer; again, starting decades ago:
http://depts.washington.edu/biowww/nobel.html
) -- these were all unexpected developments NOT easily predictable from what had come before.

One new unexpected technology is the capacity to use DNA as a computing tool, by hibridization techniques DNA has been used to solve boolean problems, and scaled to a chess play, by massive parallel computations, based on the ability of a DNA strand to stick to complementary sequneces.

Yet in diapers, but even more interestiong is the oncomming technologu of cell computing. Here they use biochemical reactions to perform calculations, here's a technical comment:

Title: 「Kinase Computing: Exploring Computational Mechanism by
Signaling Pathways in Cells」

Using the living cell, which is one of the most promising
functional materials for building nanobiomachines for massively
parallel computation, a new biomolecular computing method - Kinase
Computing - is initiated. Kinase computing process is carried out
based on the signaling pathways of phosphorylation and
dephosphorylation switched by kinases and phosphatases that are
regulated by upstream pathways of Rho family GTPases in living
cells. In the viewpoint of methodology, kinase computing differs from
the Adleman-Lipton paradigm of DNA computers. The two main merits of
this type of biomolecular computing process are the low cost of
pathway control for cells and the high efficiency of the related
computing processes, when certain pathway controllers are designed for
the engineered pathway units of biomolecular computers.

In this talk, feasible protocols (algorithms), a computation model,
benchmark testing (by 3-SAT problem solving) and
interaction/cross-talk mechanism of kinase computing will be
presented. In order to obtain high programmability from molecular
computation, the pathway regulation schemes for universal computation
are designed and simulated. The latest results on designing feasible
operators and the related computer architecture by the engineered
pathways in cells under the regulation of Rho family GTPases for
large-scale biomolecular computers will be discussed as well. Here,
the crosstalking processes among the pathways, feedback between the
downstream and upstream pathways, and interaction with the nuclear
receptors of cells are employed. This is prerequisite for experimental
implementation of a computing nanobiomachine based on the signaling
pathways of Rho family GTPases and in the form of MDCK epithelial
cells. Consequently, the costs can be cut in the number of controlled
signaling molecules for engineered pathways when the interaction
ratings of pathways are regulated on the scale of an entire cell. In
terms of designed controllable cross-talk mechanism of engineered
GTPase-based signaling communications, stable kinase computing under
dynamical environment of cell culture (i.e., assay) can be obtained in
theory and in simulation. This is significant to the applications of
molecular computing in modeling and simulation for medical designing
by bioinformatics and is also expected to be helpful to new
nature-inspired unconventional computing paradigms.

You'll find lots of this info in books and TV series by James Burke. Google or search on Amazon.

Actually the idea that species could go extinct was a complete surprise. The first dinosaur bones (found in NJ) were dismissed as an anomoly, and the notion of fossils were a long time coming because everyone assumed that species were forever.

Conservation. Did anyone ever think species and natural resources would not forever be abundant?

I would think that discovering that electricity moves muscles must have been quite unexpected.

I think one could also argue that certain expectations also somewhat negatively influenced what was discovered, such as the notion of elements (gold, helium, etc.) as being irreducible primaries, and then atoms being indivisible. I would think the periodic table must have been quite unexpected, although I'm sure one could draw parallels in principle to various pre-socratic theories of substance, but I mean the specific, integral progression of proton counts.

If one thinks back to the early Greeks, "materialism" as described by Democritus, although not really "discovered" at that time, was certainly unexpected and foreign to the thinking back then, and one could say that any specifics of the mechanisms of consciousness and free will will be unexpected to today's materialists if they ever become clearer to us from an "outside-of-consciousness" (i.e. non-introspective) perspective.

I don't think propagation of light as taking time was ever conceived in antiquity.

I actually agree with you Archon 23. The idea that what technology wants is opportunities and options is central to my book.

And I had not thought of the zipper as an unexpected technology, Michael, but I guess it is.

...while the scope and the depths of your inquiry kevin becomes an intrigue and definite foods for discussions and contemplation - i do have a bit of disagreement in one aspect:

i do not believe that one can list the infinite amounts of vast and ceaseless technologies as if listing items that one might purchase from a supermarket for the simple reason that the inherent problem with such an approach comes down to the limitation of spirit --

what technology demands and what technology has come to provide has always been about the limitless options for expression and in this lies the kernel of evolution: all art and all kraft and all true religion and all true politics lies within the ability to gain and to access paths of limitless expressions.

as all religious writings express (..when taken far away from the complete dogmatising of the message...) the word or the logos finds ultimate expression within the vast realms of endless expressions: in the very pertinent example of quantum physics the works of einstein, heisenberg, and schrodinger not only shattered the doors of newtonian physic's blind eye to the immense impossibilities of subatomic particles and paralell universes but the birth of quantum physics itself would arise during a very pivotal moment in terms of the explosion of the arts: of literature: of political realignments and fragmentations: and the general social upheavals and social un-rest that would result in the pivotal movements of the decades of the fifities: sixties: seventies: eighties: and nineties.....

such elements of eras and movements and breakdowns and breakthroughs have entered within the same simmering aspects of technology that strongly suggest that there exists a very strong internal and external reason to consider that the very concept of technology might represent the stronger levels of a hyperintelligence that has been hinted towards within the works of carl jung and wilhelm reich -- a type of uberlibido where the creative impulse has never been about semantical limitations but the limitless semantics of a meta-kraft that continually pushes upon the walls created as mere references and challenges to be overcomed and pursued....

...what does technology wants: perhaps nothing more than a purposeless intent to continue to evolove: to expand: to destroy: to resurrect: and to relentlessly pursue the hour and the breath of the very word itself of spirit -- and while that ongoing listing of technologies and theories and thoughts and conceptual values becomes an important tool and an important outlet to establish kevin: perhaps what must be established within this context and within this forum should be the rapid understanding that we are all standing within the shadows and the fires of the living word that could never ever be subjugated to the venoms of mere separation and dogma:

that one can never escape the presence of spirit:
that one can never escape the living art of the word:
that one can never escape the living inheritance of potential that possesses no limits and most importantly i believe -- no moral frame other than to evolve and to continue to be relentless in expression and expressions.

The transistor was unexpected, and has allowed the miniaturization of electronics.

Perhaps velcro qualifies as unpredicted technology.

After all, with zippers, buttons, buckles, shoelaces, belts, snaps, glue, and tape who needed or could think of another way to fasten pieces of cloth (or anything else) together? George de Mestral in 1948 noticed burrs stuck to his clothing and got the idea after looking at the burrs under a microscope. It took 8 years to get it right, where it was first met with laughter. But now it's everywhere.

PCR is a great example.

Another is reverse transcriptase, which won a Nobel Prize for Baltimore and Temin and shattered the "Central Dogma of Molecular Biology."

RNAi/siRNA as a nearly-universal gene knockdown technology has bypassed the requirement for classical genetic systems for many types of experiments with several experimental organisms, most notably the nematode worm C. elegans. This very unexpected technology may also be an example of a leapfrog technology. Nobel prize(s) on the way, probably!

Green fluorescent protein has transformed much of cell biology; the resulting developments were, I think, unexpected.

Epigenetic inheritence through protein folding states (prions) was certainly unexpected. Again, a Nobel prize resulted (Pruisner; see also Reed Wickner's experiments wiht yeast).

The success of shotgun sequencing of whole genomes was unexpected -- and was also a leapfrog technology, because it dramatically reduced dependence on the construction of classical genetic and physical maps of genomes. (The contributing technologies here were cheap DNA sequencing and cheap computer time for sequence assembly, both by that time very much expected.)

Netflix as a preferred medium for movie rental was, I think, unexpected. Certainly, it was not expected that this technology would be moving more bits/unit time through USPS than move through the internet (I don't know if this is still true; a year or 2 ago, it apparently was).

Hi,

It seems like many of the technologies that Clarke lists came out of the discovery of the unexpected quantum-physical behavior of the atom and its subatomic particles- lasers, NMR, the nuclear decay of carbon-14. In this case one revolution in the field of physics/chemistry produced a whole array of new applications of our scientific knowledge.

It's hard to think of another revolution in scientific thought that generated the shockwaves of the discovery/postulation of quantum mechanics. After thinking about molecular biology and genetics for a little while, I did think of the discovery of extremophile bacteria. Some bacteria can withstand exposure to extreme conditions, like high radiation, due to the ability to regenerate their DNA very quickly (they also use some other preventative measures). Impressive cancer preventing technologies could potentially be derived from this ability (? who knows). If you are looking for some already-created technologies, consider that PCR, the process that amplifies a small sample of DNA by using biological DNA polymerase molecules, must work under conditions where the DNA has been denatured (unraveled) by high temperatures. A special DNA polymerase found in extremophile bacteria that live in very hot places (i believe in underwater geysers of some type) is needed to replicate the denatured DNA without becoming denatured itself. So PCR was created based on some unexpected science.

What about the recently discovered giant magnetoresistant head that is supposed to make computer data storage even more compact?

Yes, technology is trying to become aware of itself. That is a fine way to put it. Next question might be: what for, or why?

I'd love to hear more of which technologies were unpredicted.

This may not be what you wont
I feel that Tec. is tring to become aware of itself.

Re: Arthur C. Clarke's "unexpected" technologies.

Dear Kevin,

I am intrigued by your interest in connecting technology to "spiritual" issues. I have a few things to write to you about this, which I will do as soon as I can.

For now, however, I disagree with Clarke's statement that nuclear energy was not anticipated, or predicted. In fact, the Qur'án includes references to the fact that if you split the atom, you will find a sun.

This statement, which I am familiar with from the writings of Baha'u'llah, is usually invoked to illustrate a spiritual principle about the capacity that faith can impart to everyday, insignificant people.

Nevertheless, it would certainly seem to be an "anticipation" of the capability, if not a prediction. In fact, the concept was invoked often in Islamic metaphor and especially Persian Sufi poetry.

So, while nuclear energy may have been unexpected to a Westerner like Clarke, it certainly couldn't have been a surprise to educated Muslims, even during the Middle Ages.

I don't have the reference of the Qur'án available right now, but I will find it. However, I have included below a couple of statements, in context, from Baha'u'llah written during the 1850's and 1860's that draw reference to this point.

Best wishes,

Jonathan Menon
Como, Italy
jmenon@tim.eu.blackberry.com

"Far be it from us to despair at any time of the incalculable favours of God, for if it were His wish He could cause a mere atom to be transformed into a sun and a single drop into an ocean. He unlocketh thousands of doors, while man is incapable of conceiving even a single one."

"And if, confirmed by the Creator, the lover escapes from the claws od the eagle of love, he will enter The Valley of Knowledge and come out of doubt into certitude . . . . He in this station is content with the decree of God, and seeth war as peace, and findeth in death the secrets of everlasting life. With inward and outward eyes he witnesseth the mysteries of resurrection in the realms of creation and the souls of men, and with a pure heart apprehendeth the divine wisdom in the endless Manifestations of God. In the ocean he findeth a drop, in a drop he behlodeth the secrets of the sea.
Split the atom's heart, and lo!
Within it thou wilt find a sun."

END OF NOTE.

Genetics.......The development of PCR and transgenic mice I believe were all technologies that you might describe as "unexpected". From there we get proteomics and the newly emerging field of metabolomics.

It's true those particular chemicals were not predicted, but the idea of taking a substance to cure depression, or to induce a state of mind, were long desired (and therefore anticipated), and tried many times -- some with success. They just had inferior substances in some cases. I am less interested in the exact color, shape, materials, constitution of an invention and more in whether its function was expected and imagined beforehand.

The discovery of the actions in phenethlyamines qualifies, I would say. Psychotherapy was radically changed, and uncountable groups of people around the world have had their lives radically changed (who knows if this is better or for worse?). PiHKAL by Alexander Schulgin tells this tale.

There are any number of pharmaceuticals you could mention, though antidepressants come to mind first. Who knew that they would become so commonlplace, it seems now quite normal to be chemically treated for depression. I have no experience with them, but I sense real change in the frequency of these occuring and visibly changed personalites as a result.

I guess the question is did anyone before hand imagine a semi-sticky glue? Or a drug that killed infections? Both could have been imagined or even had predecessors that didn't work as well, but anticipated these inventions.

The sticky glue on the back of post-it's by 3m was originally a failed new adhesive glue.

Penecillin was originally a failed invention, I forgot what it was originally trying to accomplish.

The fermentation process by louis pasture was also orignally something else, not sure specifics but you can research the details.

During some surfing I came across a rather bizarre site which may or may not address your question.

The link above is not mine, but a link the site I mention....