The 1879 issue of the "Punch Almanack" has introduced readers with the drawing of cartoonist George du Maurier of a future t...
The 1879 issue of the "Punch Almanack" has introduced readers with the drawing of cartoonist George du Maurier of a future technology erroneously named as 'Edison's Telephonoscope.' Although not a Thomas Edison invention, it was something envisioned by Maurier that the great inventor might have come up with. It was some sort of a Victorian Skype where a mother and father sitting at home conversing while viewing their children play on the other side of the world.
Such impression of future technology may be a playful novelty but it is remarkably accurate of what the technology has become today. Nowadays, we can livestream any event and friends can just see it as it happens.
Interestingly, French illustrator Albert Robida had published a similar illustration ten years earlier where he depicted a man watching a 'televised' performance of Faust from the comfort of his own home. It is probably this image that Maurier seems to have envisioned a two-way communication that combined remote viewing with the ability to converse. Although it seems to be the first published image, the idea as predates 1879 in the form of the 'telectroscope' as coined by French scientist and publisher Louis Figuier in L’Année Scientifique et Industrielle in 1878. He hoped that it would be the medium for long-distance seeing as what the telephone for long-distance conversation.
Several similar images popped up in different publications after Maurier's famous illustration, including one from a set of trading cards entitled "In the Year 2000" that were sold as souvenirs at the 1900 Paris Exposition. There is a particular card in question entitled "Correspondance Cinema-Phono-Telegraphique" that showed an invention very similar to that pictured in Maurier's. Interestingly, at the same Paris show, a Russian scientist Constantin Perskyi read a paper to the International Electricity Congress in which he described a device called "television," the first time the word had ever been used.
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