Mark Twain may be known for his written works but he is believed to be the first one to predict smartphones and social media through ...
Mark Twain may be known for his written works but he is believed to be the first one to predict smartphones and social media through his visions of a future where people use Skype and Facetime to do video chats or Youtube and Twitch to do livestreams. He already has a primitive, rough yet clear idea of how our modern Internet works.
In his 1898 story "From The London Times In 1904," he introduced the Telectroscope, a machine that functions as a 'limitless-distance' telephone that allows the user to view events all around the world in real-time, as well as interact with people there. Basically, it is what we know as video chat, video conferencing and live streaming. In that story, the machine provides comfort to an accused murderer named Mr Clayton, who was awaiting his execution.
…day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under locks and bars.
It was this novel technology that revealed that Clayton, who was supposedly killed, was still alive after all. He was eventually released but the courts remained defiant and upheld the rule of still carrying out the execution. Despite the overwhelming evidence, Clayton was executed by the end of the story. In today's world where fake news is wreaking havoc in society, Twain's story of a scathing tale of obstinate blindness to the truth eerily reflects what's happening now.
Twain was truly a man ahead of his time but that envisioned technology was coined by French writer/publisher Louis Figuier in 1878 to popularize an invention wrongly interpreted as real and incorrectly ascribed to Alexander Graham Bell.
In reality, the imagined telectroscopes had nothing to do with the device being developed by Dr. Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter, which was christened with the ambiguous name photophone. The photophone was actually a wireless optical telephone that conveyed audio conversations on modulated light beams, the precursor for today's fiber-optic communications.
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