3 ideas
In the year 2660, the inventor Ralph 124C 41+ is on a crossed Telephot video-phone line when he sees Alice 212B 423 in Switzerland trapped by an avalanche. He saves her by beaming power from his New York lab to melt the snow around her house. Later he chases her abductors into space and locates their ship with a pulsed-wave detection device, a passage often cited as an early fictional description of radar.
It is not enough to show a device doing something marvellous. The reader's pleasure and education come from following the mechanism, which makes the story a vehicle for technical literacy rather than fantasy.
Read the novel as a catalogue with narrative scaffolding: the romance exists only to move the hero from one gadget to the next. When ideas are the real protagonist, characters flatten into tour guides and dialogue turns into lecture. That trade-off explains why a work can be historically generative and still be critically panned for inept writing.