How Has Science Fiction Affected Our Reality? (part 1)

I had an interesting conversation with a scientist I met at the Farpoint convention this past weekend. He talked about the fact that many scientific discoveries have been made by accident, and how the projects that spawned those accidental discoveries had needed funding in the first place—projects that might not have seemed to be very good investments. Although I don't think the scientist expected that grants and other funding sources should be issued for every notion of research that can be imagined, the implication was there that we might not advance in scientific discoveries if we weren't willing to give scientists the freedom to have a creative playground to pursue their research. This made me think about how science fiction has also influenced scientific progress, because many discoveries have been made as a result of inspiration from a sci-fi story. For instance, H.G. Wells envisioned an atomic bomb in his story, “The World Set Free,” which was published in 1914, and a submarine was imagined by Jules Verne in his story, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” which was first published in 1870. How much has science fiction influenced those who funded the scientific research that prompted these ideas to become reality?