Science-fiction suggested we’d be teleporting, time-travelling or at least commuting via jetpack by now. Instead, we live in a sadly grounded world devoid of flying cars, no colonies on Mars or houses on the Moon. The one thing we do have is wireless telephony, which is, when one stops to think about it, a kind of magic too. It was a future foretold in comic strips and movies, animation and sci-fi TV shows. See what they predicted, and what we got (reality, in this case, was often an improvement).
Smartwatches have been around for less than a decade; Apple Watch was released in 2015. But the idea of a multifunctional watch can be traced to a comic strip from the 1930s. Detective Dick Tracy’s famous watch communicator (above left), which first appeared on his wrist in 1946, was a two-way radio link with police headquarters. It was atom-powered and supremely hi-tech.
Comic creator Chester Gould consulted with Al Gross, a wireless technology pioneer, while drawing up the device. In 1964, the watch was upgraded to include video functionality and a wrist-sized display screen.
About 35 years later, in 1999, Samsung launched the SPH-WP10 watch communicator (above right), nicknamed the Dick Tracy watch. It had a digital directory, voice-activated dialling, and could tell time. It didn’t quite take off because it was tedious to use and so bulky that it looked like there actually was a phone on one’s wrist.
Face time
In The Jetsons (1962-1963 and 1985-1987), an animated TV series set in 2062, video-calling devices were everywhere. Like much of the imagined tech on the show, each device had just one function. The videophones were TV-sized monitors controlled via a console. It was never clear exactly how the call system worked, since George Jetson’s boss periodically popped up on screen, talking and listening in unbidden, at inopportune moments. Each family member did seem to have their own device. Wife Jane Jetson’s was a sleeker, likely newer, appliance (above) in her signature palette of white and purple.
The first “flip phone” appeared in fiction about 30 years before it did in the real world. Star Trek’s Captain Kirk used a handheld communicator to contact starships in orbit. The device, which appeared twice in Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-69), was drawn up by prop designer Wah Chang and is said to have inspired Motorola’s StarTAC (above). Released in 1996, it was the first phone in the real world to flip open and shut, just like Kirk’s communicator.
Scenes from space
Responding to a lawsuit filed by Apple in 2011, Samsung argued that Steve Jobs’s company didn’t invent the design and functionality of the iPad at all, and cited scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, to support the claim.
As astronomer Heywood R Floyd journeys into space, in the sci-fi classic, he flips through newspaper items from Earth on a newspad. The text is automatically updated every hour, and as Arthur C Clarke, author of the source book, wrote, “even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.”
Incidentally, Apple wasn’t exactly the first in the real world either. Microsoft released Tablet PC in 2001, nearly a decade before the iPad came around in 2010. The former came with a stylus, Windows interface, and fairly limited capability. It’s hard to compare devices that are generations apart, and really just distant cousins, but Tablet PC did precede its smarter, sleeker successor.
Itsy-bitsy
In the satirical 2001 film Zoolander, Ben Stiller flips open the tiniest of small phones (above), the size of a matchbox. At a time when phones in the real world were shrinking fast, and the smallest phones earned their owners the most prestige, this was a riff on how far people might be willing to take the miniaturisation trend. Of course, then the smartphone turned everything around, making bigger better again, as the handheld devices became stand-ins for the laptop.
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