Many years ago, the 1930's I think, (maybe the '20's, even) there began a comic strip called Dick Tracy. It was characterized by weird looking villains, a jut-jawed cop, wildly colored cars - like the ones on the street today, and a contraption Dick Tracy and the rest of the cops used for communication, the wrist radio. It was a watch type contraption with a band which they talked into like a walkie-talkie, or cell phone.
Note that radios at that time used tubes, not even transistors, and two-way radios weighed in the tens of pounds at their lightest. Chester Gould, the author, anticipated lightweight circuitry and private use of the electromagnetic spectrum not 20 years after the first public radio stations went on the air - my dad had one of those early radios - it was about four feet tall and weighed 55 pounds!
Not content with radios, in the 60's, Gould created the wrist TV, a two-way television for the wrist. It actually operated pretty much the same as our current smart phones, only it was smaller. I'll guess the next generations of smart phones will be equally small - I've seen one prototype that fits into a pair of glasses. (Anyone who builds one can buy the idea from me cheap! See my previous blog.)
Sad to say, Gould died before the cell phone explosion, so he never saw his brainchild become reality. I read somewhere that the wrist radio was intended to be a joke and he never expected it to come true. What do we know about the future, anyway?
____________________________
Next time I will discuss some of the things we take for granted in our daily lives, that the writers of the fifties, and before, completely missed.
No comments:
Post a Comment