Arthur C Clarke "invented" the iPod

in the short story "The Seeker of the Sphinx" (1951) apparently.

'You see,' she said proudly, 'wherever I go now I can have music with me. Jon says there are so many thousands of hours of it stored up that I'll never know when it repeats itself. Isn't it clever?'

'Perhaps it is,' said Brant grudgingly, 'but it isn't exactly new. Everyone used to carry this sort of thing once, until there was no silence anywhere on Earth and they had to be forbidden. Just think of the chaos if we all had them!'

Clarke later commented: "I'm amused to see that I predicted not only the invention of ultra-portable music players, but also the fact that they would quickly become such a public menace they would be banned. The second part of this prophecy, alas, has not yet been fulfilled."

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