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"Science fiction and science have always danced around each other. Science fiction is the subconscious of science."
- Greg Bear
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| Public Call | ||
| A form of communication in which a group of people would remain isolated, but through technology could see and hear each other. |
One of the earliest descriptions of what we would describe as a zoom call, or conference call, in which all participants could see and hear each other.
| The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her arm-chair she spoke, while they in their arm-chairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest...
Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received. |
| Technovelgy from The Machine Stops,
by E.M. Forster. Published by Oxford and Cambridge Review in 1909 Additional resources -
|
As a one-to-many system, compare to the Mirror Grid Multiple-View Surveillance Panel from Wandl, the Invader (1932) by Ray Cummings and the Multi-View Surveillance Display from This Moment of Storm (1966) by Roger Zelazny.
See also the Zoom Call Visaphone System from John Jones's Dollar (195) by Harry Stephen Keeler and the virtual assembly from If The Sun Died (1931) by R.F. Starzl.
As a videocalling system, compare to the detailed article about the telephonoscope from Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century) (1882) by Albert Robida, 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
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.
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'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
