Prochronic Product

One way to show that an inventor is a genius, in a work with a historical setting, is to show them inventing something familiar to the audience that in recorded history wasn't invented until significantly later. Sometimes this will be an invention so far ahead of its time that even the basic principles underlying its operation had not yet been discovered, such as an electronic computer that predates the historical development of electronics (or, in an extreme case, the harnessing of electricity).

A Prochronism is a type of anachronism which could not have been made during the time period. because either the technology level was not there yet, or the materials needed would have been nowhere to be found.

In a comedic work, the invention may be dismissed with, "It Will Never Catch On". Another comedic variant is for the inventor to come very close to formulating a famous invention, but make some obvious mistake and then abandon the project entirely. A more dramatic work may provide a tragic explanation for why their invention remains unknown to history. A One-Man Industrial Revolution will likely contain at least one Prochronic Product.

In real life, several historical inventors have left behind works describing primitive versions of technologies that would not be rediscovered in practical forms until much later; commonly cited examples include Hero of Alexandria and Leonardo da Vinci. Fictional works sometimes depict them as examples of this trope, having created fully working versions of their ideas.

Subtrope of Anachronism Stew. Compare and contrast with Ancient Astronauts and Giving Radio to the Romans, in which the "inventor" is a visitor from another world or time where his "creation" is commonplace. If the inventor is part of the backstory, their invention may resurface as an example of Lost Technology. If the invention isn't lost to history, it might result in Low Culture, High Tech, or a Punk Punk Alternate History. Contrast Reed Richards Is Useless, the trope where a genius in the present day creates futuristic inventions that fail to have an impact on the course of history. If the whole setting is filled with these products, it's Schizo Tech.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Moriarty the Patriot: Von Herder invents both a revolver that shoots paint bullets and radio earpieces for communication...in the Victorian era.
• In Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, set in 1889 and 1890, Jean build a plane (invented on 1903), an escalator (invented on 1892), and a helicopter (first working model in 1936) among others.
• Secret of Cerulean Sand: Professor Kamale creates nuclear-powered flying machines for Neo City, which had been built during the Victorian Era.

Comic Books

• Alix: One book had a steam-propelled ship (with a prop and not wheels) under the Roman empire. Naturally, neither it nor the inventor last much longer.
• Léonard le Génie: Much of the humor comes from Leonard coming up with modern inventions that fail due to the Renaissance setting, such as a chainsaw that the lumberjacks use as a regular handsaw (then complain that it doesn't work).
• Marvel 1602: Richard Reed's genius is shown by him anticipating many principles of modern chemistry and physics (including subatomic particles and the speed of light), and inventing batteries and other modern devices.
• Planetary: Several issues tell stories about a group of geniuses and adventurers who secretly protected the world in the 1930s and 1940s. They had electronic computers at a time when mechanical computers were still a novelty, and in 1945 they finished construction of a quantum computer — the first test of which went Horribly Right, resulting in the deaths of most of them. It's also mentioned in passing that one member of the group had a private jet designed with stealth features that wouldn't be (re-)invented until the 1970s.

Films — Live-Action

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Nemo is implied to have discovered nuclear fusion almost a century earlier than in real life, as he shows Aronnax the power source of his submarine the Nautilus, all but stated to be a nuclear core. All knowledge of this is presumably lost when Nemo sinks the Nautilus and destroys his island base.
• Around the World in 80 Days (2004): Phileas Fogg's inventions include jetpacks.^note Some would include roller skates to these, except one can find newspaper ads for the first roller skates from the 1850's.
• Back to the Future Part III: Doc Brown's invoked affinity for Jules Verne's prochronic oriented science fiction leads him creating quite a few things that are ahead of their time for 1885. First, a high power sniper rifle with a telescope — able to "shoot a flea off a dog's back at 500 yards", it is by about 75 years before perfection of rifling technology for common availability. He constructs a clockwork mechanism able to cook breakfast in the morning. A refrigerator machine, half the size of his shed, able to produce ice cubes — about 50 years early than the invention of freon. Shown but not discussed, there are electricity powered toys on the mockup of their plans to use the time machine pushed on tracks by a locomotive. Also, in the same film, Doc explains to Marty his prochronic creation of Presto-logs, wood logs substitutes that he chemically treated to burn hotter and longer to make the locomotive run faster than usual — these are also about 50 years earlier. This all serve to foreshadow that he later built a levitating time machine into a locomotive. Writer Bob Gale even compared Doc Brown with Leonardo Da Vinci — a genius ahead of his time. Justified, as he is a mad scientist from 1985.
• A Knight's Tale: Kate, the group's blacksmith, is suggested to have developed a version of the Bessemer process for steelmaking in the middle of the 14th century, allowing her to forge William a suit of plate armor much lighter than any other knight has.
• The Scorpion King: An inventor creates gunpowder 3000 years before it should have been.
• According to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Sherlock Holmes invented an adrenaline autoinjector in 1891, about 10 years before adrenaline was discovered in real life and 92 years before autoinjectors became widely available.

Literature

• In Harry Turtledove's Agent Of Byzantium stories, the protagonist Basil Argyros is a co-inventor of vaccination against smallpox.
• The Barsac Mission: For the settlement of Blacklands, during The Gay '90s, Marcel Camaret invents flying gliders, greens the Sahara desert thanks to cloud seeding and a closed-circuit television camera network to supervise the slaves working for the city.

• The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Just War is set during World War II, and the plot hook is that the Nazis have a genius polymath inventor working for them who is providing advanced technology including a stealth bomber. In the end, the inventor dies while testing one of his inventions and the heroes arrange for the existing prototypes to be destroyed, preserving the timeline.
• In Rainbird by R. A. Lafferty, the protagonist — living between the 18th and 19th century — invents the lightbulb, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, nuclear energy, space travel and Terraforming, among other things. His secret? After inventing a Time Machine, he went and gave tips to his younger self.
• In The Sorcerer's Daughter, set somewhere in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance, Rothbart develops a theory that suggests the existence of bacteria (he calls them "the plague greenflies"), which allows him to modernise and greatly improve treatments and disinfection during the plague epidemic and eventually create an antibiotic. (Though the use of natural antibiotic-containing products is Older Than Dirt, the specific preparation of antibacterial agents in Real Life only started after the discovery of bacteria, in the late 19th century.)
• Subversive Activity revolves around the invention, in the 1870s, of a submarine a century ahead of its time. At the end of the novel, the inventor scuttles it and destroys the plans after realizing how dangerous it would be in the wrong hands — then goes on to invent a heavier-than-air aircraft.

Live-Action TV

• The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.: One of the running themes in the series is Brisco fascinated by "the coming thing," various advanced inventions from side characters, villains, and his friend Professor Wickwire. The inventions are common to our time, but astounding in the Old West setting. Examples include an "inner space suit" (a diving suit) "motorized steel horses" (motorcycles), and Wickwire rigging up a rocket sled on a train track.
• The Adventures of Sinbad featured a scientist named Firouz, who over the course of the show created such things as a bicycle, an umbrella, explosives and laser weaponry.
• Doctor Who: In "Pyramids of Mars", set in 1911, scientist Laurence Scarman shows The Doctor his "marconiscope", a primitive form of the radio telescope. The Doctor is surprised by this as this is around twenty years before the first actual crude prototypes appeared and around forty years before the first fully realised versions were constructed in recorded history. During the events of the serial, Scarman is killed, the machine is smashed and then the building containing it burns to the ground, destroying the remnants and all knowledge of the device and keeping the timeline intact.
• Halt and Catch Fire: One episode sees the crew at Mutiny create a functional broadband network in the late 1980s, whereas in real life, broadband did not become widely available until a decade later.
• In the 2004 Hong Kong TVB drama, Lady Fan, one of the supporting characters, Ying-Lung, is an inventor, and in one episode he created a motorcycle using Bamboo Technology... in Tang Dynasty China! The motorcycle appeared for only one episode and never shows up for the rest of the show.
• In the 2011 CBBC series Leonardo, the teenaged Leonardo da Vinci's inventions include a robot and a bicycle. In season 1 the bicycle looks like a vaguely plausible clockpunk construction, but in season 2 it's a simply a mountain bike. He also adds an engine. His superweapon in Season 2 is basically a tank, even more so than his Real Life invention that was basically a tank. The episode "Time Waits" features an accurate pocket watch of the sort invented in the 18th century, although it's possible its owner is a time traveller.
• Murdoch Mysteries: In the course of capturing criminals, Murdoch invents (or at least, reads about and builds the first policework-oriented copy of) very nearly every technology of the 20th century. Many of which (e.g. sonar or the fax machine) he could have patented and gotten rich, but they're invariably forgotten by next week's episode.
• Mysterious Island (the 1995 TV series inspired by the Jules Verne novel) depicts Captain Nemo as the inventor of many advanced gadgets which he has kept for his own use, including a form of closed-circuit television that he uses to monitor the inhabitants of the island.
• Attempted in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Time", in which the time-traveling Berlinghoff Rasmussen visits the Enterprise to observe a historic moment. In reality, he's a 22nd century criminal that murdered the time machine's inventor, and has taken various Enterprise devices, intending to foist them as his own inventions back in New Jersey. His kleptomania is detected, and he ends up in the ship's brig, still an insignificant, non-noteworthy criminal.
• The Wild Wild West:
  • Set in the early 1870s, throughout the series West and Gordon face up against numerous Mad Scientists, several of which have invented a variety of futuristic gadgets and devices including: radio controlled missiles ("The Night of the Steel Assassin"), a homing torpedo ("The Night of the Watery Death"), advanced plastic surgery ("The Night of the Ready-Made Corpse"), a matchmaking computer ("The Night of the Vicious Valentine") and a tank ("The Night of the Juggernaut"). The episodes nearly always end with their inventor dying and thus their discovery lost, with either Artie occasionally mentioning the shame at the loss or it being stated their tech was taken in by the government but it's predicted it will take the scientists years to figure out how to replicate it.
  • The standout example of the series being West and Gordon's personal Archenemy Doctor Miguelito Loveless who regularly invents inventions decades ahead of his time; in his first two appearances alone he has already perfected light bulbs, cathode tubes, electric fences, etc. Loveless is a misanthropic criminal mastermind who makes it absolutely clear he has no interest in his inventions benefiting anyone by himself, though Jim and Artie still occasionally marvel at or mock his technological innovations.

Tabletop Games

• GURPS has rules that allow players to invent such creations, if they have enough gadgeteer bonuses and/or an unusual background.

Video Games

• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood: The DLC "The DaVinci Disappearance" makes Leonardo da Vinci this. Ezio must save his old friend from the Templar who have forced him to create four weapons of war for them, a bomber glider, a machine gun, a one man gun boat, and a tank. While Leonardo's notes do indeed contain plans and drawings for some fantastical devices that see their creation today, he never actually got around to making any of them^note (A few modern day engineers have dubbed them unworkable, if only because Leonardo didn't yet understand the necessary science behind them. Needless to say all four are destroyed by the hero, and thus have to wait until their proper dates of creation to see use again.
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance: You can find an "Old Radio" and a "Phonograph" as decorations for your room, despite the fact that the game takes place in 1748.
• Genshin Impact: The world of Teyvat is mainly set in the equivalent of the Medieval era, but there are a few cases of advanced technology being present well ahead of their time. One such technology is the phonograph, which was invented by a well-known adventurer and The Archmage Alice. In the real world, phonographs were not invented until 1877 by Thomas Edison, making its appearance in a Medieval society all the more noticeable. Possibly Justified as Alice has shown signs of being a dimensional traveller and the fifth nation, Fontaine, has a definite steampunk theme with small blimps.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Exaggerated in supplemental media. The WAR! Update stated that Abraham Lincoln invented the staircase, and that he died attempting to Rocket Jump up them at Ford's Theater, implying and later outright stating that the invention of the rocket launcher predated the invention of the staircase, by at least three hundred years.
  • Australium greatly enhances the technological level of the entire country of Australia, to the point where teleportation and flying cars are commonplace in the 1960s, with the side effect being that everyone in Australia, even the women, have full mustaches and incredibly buff bodies. And the supply of Australium starts drying up...
• West of Loathing is supposedly set in the old west, but features gramophones. Given this is Loathing we're talking about, Rule of Funny is in full effect.

Visual Novels

• The Great Ace Attorney:
  • In the final case of the second game, Sholmes and Iris use hologram technology to broadcast the events of the court to the Queen, and Sholmes himself back to the courtroom. In 1900, give or take a few decades. Before that, he also invented a precursor to Luminol and a two-way radio contained in a pair of keychain-sized mascot figures that alert the user about an incoming call by pinching them.
  • Subverted in the third case of the second game; Professor Harebrayne's teleportation device really doesn't work. Sholmes himself declares it an impossibility.

Web Videos

• Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party: H. G. Wells showed up to the party with a prototype microwave, which everyone immediately dismisses as stupid.

Western Animation

• Castlevania: Many vampires have access to mechanical, medical, and chemical inventions that are anachronistic to the 15th century, such as working electric lights. This is justified in-universe by the fact that vampires are immortal; someone else discovered these things in the past, but over many human generations, the discoveries were lost to time. For vampires, however, those discoveries are still fresh in their memories, and they've had plenty of time to tinker and improve upon them.
• The Fairly OddParents!: In "Odd, Odd West", Timmy travels back to the Old West and meets AJ's ancestor, who has built a computer. The invention never catches on because nobody can be bothered to read the operating manual.
• James Bond Jr.: One episode is centered around a villain's attempts to find a superweapon designed and built by Leonardo da Vinci. It turns out to be a submarine with a torpedo launcher and a laser cannon.
• Time Squad: A few inventors that the Time Squad comes across fall into this.
  • Such as Louis Pasteur inventing powdered fruit drink mix instead of the method of pasteurizing milk in 1862.
  • Or the first episode, where Eli Whitney invented an army of flesh-eating robots... for some reason.

Real Life

• The Antikythera Mechanism or Device, is an Ancient Greek hand-operated orrery^note a model of the Solar System often described as the oldest known example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions of the first five planets and eclipses of the Sun and Moon^note among many other features. It is estimated, through carbon dating, to be from around 85 BC or even up to 205 BC — reason for being on this list is that research that went into its construction was lost to history, and no other device of such complexity existing up until the 14th century.

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