The Telephonoscope (1879)

The thing I love about these old illustrations that predict the future from long ago in the past is not what they get right but what they get wrong.

They focus on a singular aspect of future technology but due to the limitations of their imagination aren't able to predict other entirely new revolutionary technologies and so default to their current ways of interacting with the new tech.

So for example, they predict the cross-continent visible and audio interaction but use the large unwieldy gramophone style microphone to capture the speech being unable to imagine capturing audio from a tiny electronic device.

In other examples I've seen [1], you see a farmer with his auto-farming machinery but he's using enormous levers to interact with it. And then there's the frequent use cast iron to build some of this "future tech" when of course, not much is made from cast iron these days.

It makes me wonder what things we literally can't imagine about the future now. Or how different technologies that we can imagine could come together to produce entirely new things.

[1] http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year...

It wasn't really a very impressive prediction though - if it even was one. I mean, the technical details are all wrong. The only correct aspect was how people would use video-conf. But I can't help thinking that this is just an encapsulation of a common human desire to connect with friends and family, rather than a prediction of technology (other than perhaps, if we're feeling generous, to note that he correctly anticipated that technology would eventually be able to do this).

To look at it another way, I wouldn't credit the writers of Star Trek for 'predicting' a transporter if one ever gets made. Or warp engines, or pretty much any of the high-tech gadgets in the series. They aren't predicting them, they are simply stating that these would be very cool things to have. The fact that sometimes engineering catches up to human desire is at the same time remarkable, and completely normal.

Jules Verne predicted 'teleconference' in 1863 in one of his first books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century

  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...

Can't quite absolve Edison of guilt here. Maurier might have been repeating a rumor from the great man himself. Edison was a master of FUD, claiming that he had things like 3D movies with sound running in the labs and predicting their imminent release, just to keep his competitors off guard.