Anyone familiar with comic books should know the name Jack Kirby. He was credited with creating many all-time great Marvel superheroes.
During WWII, he and partner Joe Simon created Captain America.
Then Kirby was drafted into the US military and was sent to Europe to join the war effort.
Upon his return, he languished in the comic book world until he hit his stride in the 1950s and 1960s.
That’s when he created the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, the X-men, the Silver Surfer, and the Avengers.
Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were instrumental in the golden age of Marvel Comics.
In the early 1970s, though, Kirby left Marvel to join rival DC Comics, where he was given free rein to create new characters.
The result was his own comic universe that he called the Fourth World.
His trio of titles included Mister Miracle, the Forever People, and the New Gods.
Kirby intended for the comics to have a limited run. None of them caught on, and the characters have been mostly forgotten.
However, one element of all three stories was eerily prophetic.
Each of the heroes in Kirby’s Fourth World tales possessed a device called a Mother Box, an inanimate object that gave the characters their superpowers.
The box was equivalent in size to a transistor radio (or sometimes a cube) and each held the capabilities of a supercomputer.
Essentially, Jack Kirby envisioned smart phones decades before they existed.
The Mother Boxes pinged when communicating with whoever possessed them — a sound just like what an iPhone emits when receiving a notification.
In Kirby’s imaginative world, Mother Boxes had magic powers far beyond computers, however. They could open portals for instantaneous travels, which he called boom tubes.
A writer for Entertainment Weekly magazine described a Mother Box as “a smart phone, as designed by gods.”
Apple debuted its handheld device called the Newton in August 1993, but it didn’t have anywhere near the capabilities of today’s technology.
The first so-called smart phone was created by IBM in the summer of 1994. It was called Simon.
As pocket-sized computers go, Simon underwhelmed. But it was a precursor of the ubiquitous devices we carry today.
Jack Kirby didn’t live long enough to see the Simon or any other smart phones. He died in February 1994, twenty-three years after he conceived the Mother Box.
Had he lived another 8-to-13 years, Kirby would have witnessed the birth of the Blackberry and the iPhone, and he could have claimed he’d dreamed them up decades ago.
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