The Internet (1898)
The first person to write about the possibilities of a globally connected community was Mark Twain in the late 19th century, long before Al Gore was even born. In Twain’s 1898 short story “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” he wrote that the “telectroscope” (inventor Jan Szczepanik’s real late 19th-century creation) would use the phone system to create a worldwide network for sharing information.
This innovation, Twain wrote, would make “the daily doings of the globe… visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues.” So, the next time you use Twitter and YouTube, always remember that the guy who wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn thought of it first.
