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"Why does a creative person create? It's a type of compulsion. I like to explore new ideas."
- Bart Kosko
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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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Tech news articles related to works by Edward Page Mitchell
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
