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"I just can't be politic. I never learned how to do that and I don't like doing that. I think it's false."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Radio-Facsimile Receiver | ||
| A device that prints a newspaper in your home. |
Not really a prediction, Wilcox shows us a future that is now gone, thanks to highly readable displays that are so thin and light you can carry them throughout the house.
| Alone in his apartment, the feverish
young King of Speed paced, waited for
his radio-facsimile receiver to bring the
evening news. He was on a spot. By
this time the nation's press services
doubtless knew of his stinging defeat.
The radio buzzed. Layer by layer, the headlines printed off. |
| Technovelgy from Ben Gleed, King of Speed,
by Don Wilcox. Published by Amazing Stories in 1939 Additional resources -
|
By the year of this story, W9XZY of St. Louis delivers the First Daily Newspaper by Radio Facsimile. More than 1,000 U.S. households are experimentally equipped with fax receivers that electronically print morning newspapers overnight.
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).
Don't forget the oldest reference I know about, the home news printer from The Senator's Daughter (1879) by Edward Page Mitchell.
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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.'
