Re:Ladies Home Journal (1900) Predictions for 2000
by mmastrac on Friday January 01, 2010 @06:24PM
(#1026436)
"Prediction #10: Man will See Around the World. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span. American audiences in their theatres will view upon huge curtains before them the coronations of kings in Europe or the progress of battles in the Orient. The instrument bringing these distant scenes to the very doors of people will be connected with a giant telephone apparatus transmitting each incidental sound in its appropriate place. Thus the guns of a distant battle will be heard to boom when seen to blaze, and thus the lips of a remote actor or singer will be heard to utter words or music when seen to move."
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Re:Ladies Home Journal (1900) Predictions for 2000
by henrikschroder on Friday January 01, 2010 @06:34PM
(#1026453)
I wonder why he missed storage of information. Is that so much harder to imagine than transmitting it directly?
Re:Ladies Home Journal (1900) Predictions for 2000
by orangecat on Friday January 01, 2010 @10:46PM
(#1026719)
This was before Turing and von Neumann; it wasn't well established that everything is data and can be stored and manipulated in arbitrary ways. (Heck, phone companies have trouble with this concept today). They were extrapolating what they saw as the special cases of telephones and cameras and phonographs.
Re:Ladies Home Journal (1900) Predictions for 2000
by mmastrac on Friday January 01, 2010 @06:42PM
(#1026463)
I think the big leap here for him was seeing live events vs. pre-recorded films. When these predictions were written, silent films would have been commonplace and live radio broadcasts weren't around. News would have been distributed via newspaper, sent world-wide by telegraph.
Re:Ladies Home Journal (1900) Predictions for 2000
by joezydeco on Friday January 01, 2010 @09:30PM
(#1026635)
But the phonograph was around for 20 years or so. So there was some information storage, just not the concept of mass reproduction and distribution.
Re:Ladies Home Journal (1900) Predictions for 2000
by mmastrac on Saturday January 02, 2010 @12:58PM
(#1027425)
The phonograph and newspaper were forms of mass reproduced, widely distributed storage though. Most of their media at the time would have been from persistant storage of some form, created once and sold many times over (newspaper, records, player piano rolls, etc).