ABSTRACT
If you believe FaceTime and Skype are 21st-century inventions, think again. In the late nineteenth and early zoth centuries, speculations on the future possibility of `tele-vision’, alternatively called ‘seeing by electricity’, ‘distant electric vision’, or identified by a host of individual inventions (telectroscope, telephonoscope, telephote, etc.), circulated ravenously. Science-fiction authors invented on the page. So did a great many journalists, engineers, and scientists who, between 1880 and 1930, contributed to the discourse of `television’. Television’s speculative era occurred long before TV sets ever made their way into domestic living spaces.
