Reading a newspaper article from 1926 reporting from a Telefunken exhibit in Berlin, and explaining that "optimists" are already thinking about cameraphones, or mobile videophones.
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Reading a newspaper article from 1926 reporting from a Telefunken exhibit in Berlin, and explaining that "optimists" are already thinking about cameraphones, or mobile videophones. Which the article has to explain in many words, of course, because talking radio was still a bleeding edge instrument.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
Isn't it funny how, only seventy years later, adding cameras to cellphones was a very controversial move?
And yet, it was done.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by [email protected]
The same issue also has an article about how "It appears that a flight to the Moon will soon become reality", crediting a Vienna space research society and one Goddard, who is described only as "an American":
A giant projectile that would weigh 5000 kilogrammes will be filled explosion-lighting powder and should reach the Moon in about 97 hours. The rocket's explosion can be viewed from Earth. If this experiment succeeds, the society will build a rocket that could carry humans.
The article then goes on to explain the complication of spacefarers having to operate while "being lighter than flies", and that "a kind of SCUBA suits together with oxygen apparatus" needs to be used for getting around on the Moon.
If the crew reaches the Moon, then everything will depend on whether huge loads of ice will be found there. Using solar power machines, burning mirrors, that can melt the ice, flowing water can be achieved and convrted into hydrogn and oxygen to resupply the rocket. One must keep in mind that the air temperature on the Moon is at least 300 degrees below zero, but despite the crazy cold, melting ice would still be possible.
One can suppose that there's giant glaciers on the Moon. These could be used akin to coal for travelling through the space. And using such power reserves, we could also attempt to travel further from the Moon, to Mars, Venus, Mercury, even Saturn and further celestial bodies. All it sounds like a fanciful fairy tale. But what could be impossible in our era of radio?
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by [email protected]
And, of course, because nihil novi, there's a story by Jaroslav Hašek about one Pan Motejzlik's troubles with trying to reveal his baby's gender too early, which is to say, before the birth. Since he doesn't know, sonography not yet being a thing, he reveals all the genders, and some further combinations such as "twin girls". As a result, once the child is born, nobody believes that the child exists, or has any genders.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
For historic context, the Apollo 11 mission happened closer in time to this article than to our present.
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It's also interesting because most of the fundamentals for all of this were worked out at that time, late 19th C. The tech though laughably inadequate demonstrated the coupling of physics to end result, eg radio and nascent image via radio (tv works literally like facsimile, an 1840s invention, you probably know all that).
Coupling that shit with biological knowledge is truly 20th C work.
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@tomjennings One of the weird things in the history of science is, there's a recurring pattern of short and intensive bursts of fundamental research followed by very slow dvelopmnt of practical uses of the research results. Reality kind of resembles the stories that some people like to tell about Tesla, except, coincidentally, mostly about other scintists; Tesla's contributions haven't led to quite such a fruitful century of slow applications as, say, Maxwell's equations, Galois's final letter before his duel, or Perkin's failed attempt at making synthetic quinine that gave a rise to the whole field of organic chemistry (and contributed to all the benefits and problems of plastics in our modern life). This can often also be applied backwards, to note that today's great developments tend to be novel uses of things first discovered fifty, a hundred, perhaps even two hundred years ago. The twentieth century may have sped things up a bit, by having two world wars in it and thereby motivating sovereign-level zillionaires to spend money on R&D, but technical advancement is nowhere near linear even now.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@tomjennings A big part of the reasons behind it is, it's often expensive to work out groundbreaking uses of old discoveries, and zillionaires with all the money tend to be hard of understanding why these uses are groundbreaking. There used to be some safety valves to this, but the Welch-Reagan deslackening in USA and its Thatcherian counterpart in UK have largely eliminated them, and the rise of cryptocurrency zillionaires and absurd ideas of a "venture capitalist's" business cycle have taken us to a point where, I fear, we're about to go through a stagnation period of some 20–30 years.
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It may be a good thing in disguise, this slackening.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to tom jennings last edited by
@tomjennings I'm not sure that's true, considering that this tends to make it easy for small numbers of powerful people to dictate the direction of R&D. A faster R&D process would almost certainly require rough equality in how financial slack is distributed among the people.
But on the counterpoint, a faster R&D process would also likely create random new power centres, requiring a central government to actively maintain the rough equality lest an oligarchy happen del novo.
