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Nobody tell Steve Jobs, but somewhere in obscure scientific history, someone actually invented the smartphone in 1902.
As it turns out, a Serbian-born physicist in America named Nikola Tesla was dreaming of the wireless world before the Blackberry was even a passing thought in a geek’s mind. Tesla, a small-scale physics genius, wrote this outrageous little tech fantasy in his notebook at the turn of the century:
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Nobody tell Steve Jobs, but somewhere in obscure scientific history, someone actually invented the smartphone in 1902.
As it turns out, a Serbian-born physicist in America named Nikola Tesla was dreaming of the wireless world before the Blackberry was even a passing thought in a geek’s mind. Tesla, a small-scale physics genius, wrote this outrageous little tech fantasy in his notebook at the turn of the century:
"[When my facility is complete]… it will be possible for a businessman in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment.”
“An inexpensive instrument, small enough the fit in your hand, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place …”
Considering the transistor wasn’t even invented until 1947, Mr Tesla was wildly ahead of his time. But alas, without the sufficient financial means to complete his project, Tesla’s fantasy of the smartphone dropped out of human consciousness for another hundred years.
Moral of the story: Gatsby was so much closer to getting an iPhone than we ever thought.
