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"I'm very taken by mythology. I read it at a very early age and kept on reading it. Before I discovered science fiction I was reading mythology."
- Roger Zelazny
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| Home News Printer | ||
| A device that prints out the newspaper of your choice right in your own home. |
This is a very early use of this idea. Remember that the idea of a "printer" - a device that you have in your home that prints out material at your command - has not been invented yet. In 1879, a "printer" is a person who works in a shop producing many copies of the same paper.
| Mr. Wanlee seemed ill at ease. He did not reply to his friend's raillery. He cast a stealthy glance at his knees in the mirror, and then went to one side of the room, where an endless strip of printed paper, about three feet wide, was slowly issuing from between noiseless rollers and falling in neat folds into a willow basket placed on the floor to receive it. Mr. Wanlee bent his head over the broad strip of paper and began to read attentively.
"You take the Contemporaneous News, I suppose," said the other. "No, I prefer the Interminable Intelligencer," replied Mr. Wanlee. "The Contemporaneous is too much of my own way of thinking. Why should a sensible man ever read the organ of his own party? How much wiser it is to keep posted on what your political opponents think and say." |
| Technovelgy from The Senator's Daughter,
by Edward Page Mitchell. Published by Not known in 1879 Additional resources -
|
The only real-life predecessor to this device that I can think of is the ticker tape machine, also called a stock ticker. This device was used to remotely print stock price information conveyed over telegraph lines from 1866 to 1970. Thomas Edison patented a stock ticker in 1869 that printed one alpha numeric character per second! The stock ticker is the real-life counterpart to the virtual ticker shown at the bottom of the screen on financial television. The patent for amplitude modulators for fax machines (allowing the transmission by phone lines) was issued in 1911.
Compare this device to the personalized news from Hugo Gernsback's 1911 novel Ralph 124c 41 + and the homeopape from his 1969 novel Ubik (it is also called the homeostatic newspaper in his 1963 story If There Were No Benny Cemoli).
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'...the rocket’s landing-arms automatically unfolded.'
'...points and patches of light... sliding all over their faces in a programmed manner that had been designed to foil facial recognition systems.'
'...the combined Wind-Suncatcher, like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'I went to the control room where the three other men were manipulating their mechanical men.'
'The low-slung monorail car, straddling its single track, bored through the shadows on a slowly rising course.'
'It was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the floor...'
'... he thrust in his charging arm to replenish his store of energy.'
'...the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort.'
