Thursday, November 19, 2020
Not prophetic
Last year I was focusing on the mysterious lateness of stereo sound, or even telephones that use both ears.
In the early development of the telephone, inventors often gave sound to both ears:
but most of these wouldn't have been practical. This one would have required using both hands for the earpieces, leaving no hands free for writing or typing.
Here's a somewhat more practical invention, found in Gernsback's Science and Invention for Mar 1920.
Note how the handgrip fits into the candlestick stand.
This still wouldn't have worked well. It has no particular advantage over the 'European' combination of one mic and one earphone. Phone operators were already using a similar two-ears-plus-mic that stayed on the head, which is really the only practical way of including all three parts.
The last sentence is more interesting.
The phone is perfectly suited to both the automatic and the future wireless phone.
There was nothing 'prophetic' about this. Everyone assumed that portable wireless phones were coming soon.
Why didn't they come soon? The first few decades are obvious. Tubes, at least as they ultimately developed, were completely unsuitable for portable devices. If the audion had continued its original small low-voltage form, things might have been different. But it didn't. So portable phones had to wait for transistors.
BUT: Portable phones DIDN'T have to wait for microprocessors. They could have developed fully around 1960, with most of the computing power in the central servers. Why not? Infrastructure. Cell towers are a huge and widespread infrastructure in cities, which we don't generally notice. Corporations had to be motivated to make that huge investment. Where did the motivation come from? Deepstate. NSA.
but most of these wouldn't have been practical. This one would have required using both hands for the earpieces, leaving no hands free for writing or typing.
Here's a somewhat more practical invention, found in Gernsback's Science and Invention for Mar 1920.
Note how the handgrip fits into the candlestick stand.
This still wouldn't have worked well. It has no particular advantage over the 'European' combination of one mic and one earphone. Phone operators were already using a similar two-ears-plus-mic that stayed on the head, which is really the only practical way of including all three parts.
The last sentence is more interesting.
The phone is perfectly suited to both the automatic and the future wireless phone.
There was nothing 'prophetic' about this. Everyone assumed that portable wireless phones were coming soon.
Why didn't they come soon? The first few decades are obvious. Tubes, at least as they ultimately developed, were completely unsuitable for portable devices. If the audion had continued its original small low-voltage form, things might have been different. But it didn't. So portable phones had to wait for transistors.
BUT: Portable phones DIDN'T have to wait for microprocessors. They could have developed fully around 1960, with most of the computing power in the central servers. Why not? Infrastructure. Cell towers are a huge and widespread infrastructure in cities, which we don't generally notice. Corporations had to be motivated to make that huge investment. Where did the motivation come from? Deepstate. NSA.
Labels: Answered better than asked
¶ 10:58 PM
