So, you big time SCIFI fans, which writers or movie makers thought of some of the best SCIFI stuff...like
Transporters/teleporters?
Faster than light space engines
Who was the first to depict aliens from outer space?
Androids?
and other great plot devices we take for granted these days.
Here's a good (if old) reference listing SF works by topic:
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/thisthat.html
On teleportation:
The earliest of all, according to Sam Moskowitz, was "The Man Without a Body"
by Edward Page Mitchell [New York Sun, 25 March 1877]. Sam Moskowitz calls
this "the first fictional exposition yet discovered of breaking matter down
into energy scientifically and transmitting it to a receiver where it may
be reformed."
The adverb "scientifically" is used by Moskowitz, one presumes, to
eliminate the earlier but more fantasy-oriented "Helionde" by Sidney
Whiting (1855) where the protagonist dreams that he is dissolved into vapor and
transmitted to an inhabited Sun.
As for FTL travel... well, the speed of light has been known to be finite for centuries and Einstein didn't prove it was an absolute limit until the early 1900s, so one could say the concept was around far earlier depending on how you define it. But as for the concept of a space drive that gets around the relativistic speed limit, that goes back at least as far as John W. Campbell's
Islands of Space in 1931, which is also apparently the earliest case I know of where the term "space warp" is used for an FTL drive. Interestingly, the quotation at that link I provided mentions the space warp drive's velocity going as the cube of its power, which is reminiscent of the warp-factor formula from
The Making of Star Trek and other TOS-era references.
There's also the OED's list of the earliest known citations of SF vocabulary words:
http://www.jessesword.com/sf/list
The OED cite for "android" claims it was used as early as 1727. However, its uses in SF date mainly from the '50s and after. As for the concept of a human-appearing automaton, regardless of what it's called, that goes back ages. Leonardo da Vinci designed a clockwork knight meant to be used in large numbers to make a defending army look bigger than it was. And records of clockwork automatons go back to the medieval Arabs and the ancient Greeks.
The idea of aliens -- people living on other planets -- wasn't something that really had to be made up. As soon as it was proposed that the planets might be other worlds rather than just balls of light on the celestial sphere, people just took it for granted that they'd be inhabited. After all, explorers found humans on every "alien" continent of the Earth they travelled to; they just saw the idea of life on other planets as a natural extension of that. It wasn't until the 20th century that we learned enough about the other planets to realize they couldn't support life. That's why Orson Welles was able to (inadvertently) fool people into thinking Martians were really invading in 1938 -- because many people still didn't know any better. There had been other hoaxes people had fallen for, like a newspaper series earlier in the century about batwinged men and butterfly-winged women living on the Moon.
(Um, 1902's Trip to the Moon, directed by Jules Verne?) It also depicted some 'aliens,' IIRC....
