...Houston Daily Post, May 7, 1899.
What will they think of next?
Good friend and fellow early Houston baseball researcher Darrell Pittman sent me a copy of this ancient cartoon over the weekend. One of the wonderful bi-products of our current SABR project work is the discovery of all kinds of interesting other facts and points of view from the past. This cartoon demonstrates beautifully how current points of view can so totally distort our perspectives on the future.
As the new medium of radio was coming into being during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and for almost two decades into the twentieth century, people basically saw this new technology as a form of either the telephone or the telegraph – and a new way to send mail and messages by wireless transmission – and nothing more. The prospects of radio’s use as a medium for broadcasting live current events and vital topical news to listeners at home had yet to really take form. Once the ideas of reaching the public with a combination of news and advertising together took place, however, and the captains of industry began to see the money to be made, radio broadcasting was off to the races in ways the designers of our 1899 cartoon hardly could have imagined.
While watching one of the the Red Sox-Astros games in HD on one of our flat screens over the weekend, I’m thinking, “It can’t get any better than this?” And no, I don’t mean the quality of the Astros’ play – I mean the television picture itself. – Come on! Really! – How much better does a picture need to be? With today’s HD, you already can see every skin mole or speck of dandruff. – Who wants more?
OK, add 3-D, but only if you can find a way to make it practical to watch without those stupid glasses.
Maybe one day we will all have hologram rooms in our homes, special areas where we may watch movies and sporting events in true 360 degree 3-D perspective action without going anywhere. Watch “Casablanca” from the perspectives of either Rick Blaine, saloon keeper, or Major Strasser of the Third Reich. Or maybe we even have a way to get into the hologram action by taking the table next to Rick and Elsa in “Casablanca” – and then eavesdropping on the first conversation the couple has had since Paris.
The hologram theatre possibilities are endlessly fascinating.
Sit next to Manager Brad Mills of the Houston Astros during the World Series – or maybe visit every planet in the universe in the company of astronaut Neil Armstrong. Both opportunities should be available some day – on the Hologram HD3DTV System’s Science Fiction Network.
Who really knows what our most brilliant technological minds will think of next? Whatever it may be, let’s hope we also grow in our mass need for creative contact and engagement with other people – and with life in general. There has to be more to communication than texting or tweeting others what we just had for lunch.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
July 5, 2011 at 6:49 pm |
I have always wanted to play left field for the Red Sox during a Fenway game….maybe one day I will be able to do so from my Home Hologram Room.
July 5, 2011 at 7:13 pm |
If Bob (see above) can do that, I’ll be at shortstop for the Yankees!
July 6, 2011 at 1:52 am |
Fenway and Wrigley, the last two Daddy won at. Send me a
personal e-mail, my sister has all the old scrapbooks.