Edison’s Futuristic Telephonoscope (1879)
The cartoon above is from the pen of George du Maurier, printed in the Punch Almanack for 1879. Although titled “Edison’s Telephonoscope” it is not, in fact, a creation of Thomas Edison’s at all (either realised or proposed) but rather an imagining by Maurier of what the great inventor might come up with next: a machine which, for all intents and purposes, amounts to some kind of Victorian Skype. A mother and father — the “Pater- and Materfamilias” — sit at home and converse with, while also viewing, their children at play across the other side of the world. The caption reads:
(Every evening, before going to bed, Pater and Materfamilias set up an electric camera obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their Children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire.) Paterfamilias (in Willow Place): “Beatrice, come closer, I want to whisper.”
More images followed Maurier’s, including one from a set of trading cards entitled “In the Year 2000” (En L’an 2000) which were sold as souvenirs at the 1900 Paris Exposition (see image below). The particular card in question – entitled “Correspondance Cinema-Phono-Telegraphique” – shows an invention very similar to that pictured in Maurier’s. Interestingly, at the same Paris show, a Russian scientist named Constantin Perskyi read a paper to the International Electrcity Congress in which he described a device called “Television”, seemingly prophetic visions pertaining to the first time the word had ever been used.
Source:
Public Domain Review