Article ID: CBB208206746

Looking into the Future: The Telectroscope That Wasn’t There (2019)

unapi

In an 1898 short story titled “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” Mark Twain introduced an electrical instrument called the telectroscope. Machines for transmitting vision at a distance, telectroscopes had been speculated about since the invention of the telephone in 1876. Over the next quarter of a century, numerous inventors were credited with its imminent, but never realized, production. No such instrument was ever actually built, and it now usually appears only in footnotes to television’s prehistory. Nevertheless, the telectroscope offers useful insights into the way the Victorian future was constructed out of assemblages of fact and fiction. In this chapter I chart the ways in which the instrument moved back and forth across the boundaries of the real. Precisely because it never existed, I suggest, the telectroscope offers an excellent example of the ways the Victorian future was made out of its own material culture.

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Article Amanda Rees; Iwan Rhys Morus (2019) Presenting Futures Past: Science Fiction and the History of Science. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-15). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Dhanawade, Anirudha
Wohleber, Curt
Barford, Megan
Fanny Gribenski
Régine Fabri
Morar, Florin-Stefan
Concepts
Material culture
Science and literature
Scientific apparatus and instruments
Technology
Supply networks; logistics; supply chain economics
Science and art
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
20th century, early
17th century
21st century
Places
United States
Europe
Great Britain
London (England)
Prussia (Germany)
North America
Institutions
British Admiralty
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