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"One could imagine a very ascetic sort of life ... where the body is ignored. This is something I've played with in my books, where people hate to be reminded sometimes that they have bodies, they find it very slow and tedious."
- William Gibson
 |
| Visiplate | ||
| A flat screen for viewing remote images. |
This is an early reference to this term. As I recall, Buck Rogers movie shorts from the thirties used what appeared to be a vision plate. The earliest attempts to project images using radio waves used a spinning mechanical disk as a mask over a varying light source to produce the picture.
The first public demonstration of television occurred in England in 1926; by the mid-1930's, a few broadcast stations sent programming to a very small number of privately-owned sets.
| Crane looked into the visiplate and gasped. |
| Technovelgy from Skylark Three,
by E.E. 'Doc' Smith. Published by Amazing Stories in 1930 Additional resources -
|
Here's another quote for this term from First Contact, a classic Murray Leinster short story:
Leinster also used this term in earlier stories (mid-thirties), but I don't have a quote from those stories. Similar terms were used in the sf from this era.
Here's an enjoyable quote from Spore Trapper, a 1937 short story by RR Winterbotham:
The earliest reference to a "vision screen" is the cinematophote, from E.M. Forster's prescient story The Machine Stops, published in 1909.
Now, of course, we actually have visiplates - that is, flat panel displays. And it only took sixty years for them to come into common usage
He handed over the photographs and looked with professional interest at the visiplates which showed all space outside the ship...There was the little gadget of oddly angled mirrors - remote descendant of the back-view mirrors of twentieth century motorists - which allowed a view of all the visiplates without turning the head. And there were the huge plates which were so much more satisfactory for a direct view of space.
The visiplate near the controls of the atomic engines glowed as he touched the contact button. A cloudy mist swirled as electrons took their places to reveal the wrinkled features of Isaac McDonald...
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More Ideas
and Technology from Skylark Three
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Tech news articles related to Skylark Three
Tech news articles related to works by E.E. 'Doc' Smith
| Did Frank Herbert Predict Bistable Displays Like E-Ink? |
| I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display |
| Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large |
| iPhone Air Fulfils Jobs' Promise From 2007 - A Giant Screen! |
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'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
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'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
