The future is a funny thing. You can miss it if you’re not
paying attention. Maybe that’s because by the time it happens it isn’t the
future anymore. It’s evolved around us and it doesn’t seem quite as bizarre, or
even as futuristic, as it sounded way back when.
What was your first foray into the future? Mine was at the
1964 Worlds’ Fair in the ATT/Bell Pavilion. Bell Laboratories unveiled the
Picturephone. The recollection that I have of it is different to what I have
read. I’m not sure if the reality evolved over the course of the Fair or if
it’s one of those cases of memory trumps reality. I remember that Picturephones
were set up in futuristic phone booths. Two callers entered the booths and each
caller saw the other on the screen. The phones looked like a business phone
with push buttons which were considered posh since most home phones were rotary
dial in those days, and the screen was oval like a Jetson house. Research
suggests the calls were completed in Disneyland, not between booths in New York.
If that’s so, then someone teleported my best friend Bernie. Now THAT’S
advanced technology and no one is talking about it even today.
I’d forgotten all about Picturephones until I read a blog
that cited a New
Yorker article. The article rehashed 50-year old predictions of what
scientists and engineers expected to be commonplace in 2018. One of those
things was the Picturephone. It seems Bell was quite serious about the 1964
technology and hopeful to have it in common usage in the 1970s. Bell’s timeline
was off, but it’s undeniable that the seeds Bell planted in 1964 at the World’s
Fair have turned into Skype, FaceTime, and a multitude of other Internet face
to face communication services.
In 1964 I saw the future, but in 2019, it took someone who
looked at the event as history to point out the event.
How about you? Have you seen the future? Did you recognize
it as it happened?
