Looking into the Future: The Telectroscope that Wasn't There

In an 1898 short story titled “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” Mark Twain introduced an electrical instrument called the telectroscope. Machines for transmitting vision at a distance, telectroscopes had been speculated about since the invention of the telephone in 1876. Over the next quarter of a century, numerous inventors were credited with its imminent, but never realized, production. No such instrument was ever actually built, and it now usually appears only in footnotes to television’s prehistory. Nevertheless, the telectroscope offers useful insights into the way the Victorian future was constructed out of assemblages of fact and fiction. In this chapter I chart the ways in which the instrument moved back and forth across the boundaries of the real. Precisely because it never existed, I suggest, the telectroscope offers an excellent example of the ways the Victorian future was made out of its own material culture.