Thomas Edison's electricity, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, the Wright Brothers' creaky biplane, H.G. Wells' time machine (OK, that last one hasn't happened yet), but through these world-changing discoveries, our daily lives have been made easier. Flick a switch and light banishes the darkness, pick up a phone and chat away to a distant cousin in Timbuktu, hop on to an airplane and go and have lunch with her the next day. All of these inventions have transformed the world into one huge global village.
But, like Rome, none of these inventions were created in a day. They are the result of years of research, testing, trial and error by their inventors.
And manga fan Hideo Nakazawa certainly knows all about that. Growing up as a big fan of cartoon characters such as Astro Boy and Tetsujin 28, Nakazawa always believed that the day would come when robots like them would populate the real world rather than just the imagination. And, driven by a desire to reshape the future, Nakazawa has been a constant source of inventive ideas, both big and small.