Mr. Edison’s Kindle



4. The Watch-Case Phonograph

As seen in: Popular Science, June 1936.

What it was: A bizarrely small phonograph built into a watch case.  You wound it up like a mechanical timepiece, whereupon a “midget record” played music through a “diminutive horn.”

Flies in the ointment: It would have required the world to accept a new media format: midget records. (Their running time is unknown–wonder if you could fit an entire song onto one side?) Also, holding the player up to your ear would have gotten old fast.

When did the basic idea become practical? The introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979 kicked off the era of pervasive, portable prerecorded music.

Modern counterpart: The iPod, of course.

5. Magic Lantern Talkies

As seen in: Popular Mechanics, October 1937.

What it was: A projector technology that permitted businesses to create presentations consisting of color slides synchronized with an audio track. Popular Mechanics’ article provides an example in which a New York City marketing company creates a 15-minute presentation (with 75 slides) and dispatches it to offices in Dallas, Memphis, Minneapolis, and Seattle. The projection equipment fit into a jumbo-sized briefcase–which, back then, sounded impressively compact.

Flies in the ointment: The theory was that businesses would hire scriptwriters, actors, and radio announcers to create these shows, making them a pricey proposition. The story says that a high-end magic lantern talkie might cost $1500–or around $23,000 in current dollars. The projector cost under $100.

When did the basic idea become practical? Businesses began using overhead projectors as a presentation aid in the late 1950s, and presentation software such as Harvard Graphics in the mid 1980s.

Modern counterpart: The unavoidable communications tool known as PowerPoint.

6. Talking Newspapers

As seen in: Popular Mechanics, June, 1938.

What it was: I’m just going to quote the article, which discusses an invention by W.G.H. Finch:

“Hurry to Police Headquarters with the sound box. Get every word of that murderer’s confession so our readers will be able to play it tonight when they see the pictures!”

Such assignments may become routine to the newspaper reporter and photographer of the future who will carry a portable recording device when he covers an important story. Every word of sound will be recorded on a film track which will be rushed to the newspaper office to be developed and printed. When the newspaper is bought that evening, it will have not only pictures and type matter but also a series of wavy lines constituting sound tracks, along the margin and, in some cases, on the page itself.

Cutting these sound tracks apart and pasting them together in a continuous strip, the reader will put them in an inexpensive reproducing device attached to his loud speaker. Then he will hear the murderer’s confession–his children will hear the comic characters in the funny section talk, bark, quack, and mew, and his wife, reading a travel article about Hawaii, will hear the soft accompaniment of guitars and ukuleles providing appropriate atmosphere.

Flies in the ointment: Sounds like a lotta work–and a predecessor of much later ill-fated attempts to encode information on periodical pages, such as Cauzin Softstrip and the CueCat. I’m not sure why Popular Mechanics, which had already reported extensively on experimental TV broadcasts, thought that anyone would prefer to cut up the evening paper to get the news in words and pictures.

When did the basic idea become practical? Depends on how you look at it–to this day, newspapers don’t talk. But audio synchronized with images became real when commercial TV broadcasting really got rolling in the the late 1940s. And newspaper Web sites began to supplement their words and pictures with audio in the 1990s.

Modern counterpart: How about newspaper podcasts?

7. Newspapers by Radio

As seen in: The Rotarian, September 1939.

What it was: A system that sent newspapers over ultra-high frequency radio waves to early fax machines in the home, eliminating the need to print and distribute them through traditional means. The Rotarian piece reports that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was the first paper to try the technology; that Transradio Press Service was planning to launch 25 radio papers; and that the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit News, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer had all obtained licenses to broadcast papers.

“The coming of the facsimile broadcast marks not merely a milestone,” says the story portentously. “It is also the dawn of a new epoch of deep importance to all of us.” It speculates that the new medium will throw newspaper employees out of work; that news stories will need to get shorter; and that the industry will have to figure out how to make advertising pay for facsimile newspapers so they’re self-sustaining. Any of this sound familiar?

Flies in the ointment: Mostly speed–or lack thereof. It took fifteen minutes to broadcast one page of content, which was why the Post-Dispatch’s electronic paper was only nine pages long. Color was also out, eliminating the possibility of a traditional Sunday comics section–but the article muses that it might not be that far off.

When did the basic idea become practical? Newspapers began to establish electronic presences on services such as CompuServe in the 1980s, then really ramped things up when the Web went mainstream in the mid-1990s.

Modern counterpart: The notion of scheduled digital delivery of a newspaper reminds me of the Kindle’s newspaper service.




42 Comments For This Post

  1. Craig McMaster Says:


  2. deadstatue Says:


  3. Mary Says:



  4. Felix Says:


  5. Albertini Says:


    Annual inflation over this period was about 3.25%.

    Why not a device costing $40?


  6. Ed H. Says:




  7. Chad Harper Says:


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  15. lol Says:

    Edison is not the ‘greatest inventor of all time’

  16. rjp Says:



  17. Topher Says:


  18. Steve Says:


  19. William Carr Says:





  20. Tony Smit Says:

    Suction cups on the fingers.

  21. Professor Says:





  22. Aaron T. Says:


  23. Guest Says:


    1/2 = 0.5 = half = 500,000 millionths
    1/20 = 0.05 = 5 hundredths = 50,000 millionths
    1/200 = 0.005 = 5 thousandths = 5,000 millionths

  24. Quiddity Says:


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  27. Tim at IMM Says:


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    And their demo video on


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    Zagros Madjd-Sadjadi
    Associate Professor of Economics
    Winston-Salem State University

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    Door Hardware

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