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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson

Lens-Tube  
  A kind of seeing device like a short-range telescope.  

That is, it was an oblong metal box, tapering toward the ends, with the greatest width forward of the middle. Twin tubes projected from the end of it, lenses in them glistening like eyes. Just below them sprang out steely, glistening tentacles several feet long, writhing and twitching as if they were alive. The tangle of green brush hid the thing's legs, so that Dan could not see them.

Suddenly it sprang toward him, rising ten feet high and covering half the distance between them. It alighted easily upon the two long, jointed metal limbs upon which it had leapt, and continued to keep the lens-tubes turned toward Dan, so he knew that the grotesque metal thing was watching him.

Technovelgy from The Doom From Planet 4, by Jack Williamson.
Published by Astounding Stories in 1931
Additional resources -

If I recall correctly, the Scarab robot from Gallun's story of that name made use of "minute vision tubes".

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Doom From Planet 4
  More Ideas and Technology by Jack Williamson
  Tech news articles related to The Doom From Planet 4
  Tech news articles related to works by Jack Williamson

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