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Science Fiction
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"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."
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![]() As far as I know, this is the earliest detailed reference to the idea of a videophone in science fiction, but see the more detailed images and references below.
In 1879, Punch's Almanack published this cartoon by French-British cartoonist George du Maurier of a fanciful device that might have been created by Thomas Edison.
![]() (Punch's Almanack for 1879 - Edison's Telephonoscope) The caption reads as follows:
(Every evening, before going to bed, Pater and Materfamilias set up an electric camera obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their Children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire.) It has been pointed out that the dimensions of the screen in the drawing shown by du Maurier are almost identical to an aspect ratio of 2.76:1. The wide screen image depicted in this 1879 India ink drawing is equal to today's Ultra Panavison 70mm film format. Although large format film has been used since the late 1880's, this ratio was not seen until Ben Hur in 1959. For comparison purposes, the aspect ratio of 4K television is 1.9 to 1. The telephonoscope also had some Zoom conferencing capabilities:
In 1927, Garett Smith makes good use of the word in Treasures of Tatalus:
Compare to the phonotelephote from In the Year 2889 (1889) by Jules Verne, the telephot from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911) by Hugo Gernsback, the video communicator from The Machine Stops (1909) by E.M. Forster, the zoom call visaphone system from John Jones's Dollar (1915) by Harry Stephen Keeler, the videophone from The Golden Girl of Munan (1928) by Harl Vincent, the optophone from Too Many Boards! (1931) by Harl Vincent and the opti-phone from The Impossible World (1939) by Eando Binder. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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