
The Telephonoscope (1879) - hownottowrite
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/the-telephonoscope-1879/
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strttn
The thing I love about these old illustrations that predict the future from
long ago in the past is not what they get right but what they get wrong.

They focus on a singular aspect of future technology but due to the
limitations of their imagination aren't able to predict other entirely new
revolutionary technologies and so default to their current ways of interacting
with the new tech.

So for example, they predict the cross-continent visible and audio interaction
but use the large unwieldy gramophone style microphone to capture the speech
being unable to imagine capturing audio from a tiny electronic device.

In other examples I've seen [1], you see a farmer with his auto-farming
machinery but he's using enormous levers to interact with it. And then there's
the frequent use cast iron to build some of this "future tech" when of course,
not much is made from cast iron these days.

It makes me wonder what things we literally can't imagine about the future
now. Or how different technologies that we can imagine could come together to
produce entirely new things.

[1] [http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-
year...](http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-
year-2000-1899-1910/)

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antimagic
It wasn't really a very impressive prediction though - if it even was one. I
mean, the technical details are all wrong. The only correct aspect was how
people would use video-conf. But I can't help thinking that this is just an
encapsulation of a common human desire to connect with friends and family,
rather than a prediction of technology (other than perhaps, if we're feeling
generous, to note that he correctly anticipated that technology would
eventually be able to do this).

To look at it another way, I wouldn't credit the writers of Star Trek for
'predicting' a transporter if one ever gets made. Or warp engines, or pretty
much any of the high-tech gadgets in the series. They aren't predicting them,
they are simply stating that these would be very cool things to have. The fact
that sometimes engineering catches up to human desire is at the same time
remarkable, and completely normal.

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jkot
Jules Verne predicted 'teleconference' in 1863 in one of his first books.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century)

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tomcam

      Although titled “Edison’s Telephonoscope” it is 
      not, in fact, a creation of Thomas Edison’s 
      at all (either realised or proposed) 
      but rather an imagining by Maurier...
    

Can't quite absolve Edison of guilt here. Maurier might have been repeating a
rumor from the great man himself. Edison was a master of FUD, claiming that he
had things like 3D movies with sound running in the labs and predicting their
imminent release, just to keep his competitors off guard.

