I’ve been cleaning out my den. In my bookcase there I have a complete sets of large-format paperback books from Paradox Press (a division of DC) in a series called The Big Book of (Whatever). For Whatever substitute the book subject – Conspiracies, Martyrs, Urban Legends, etc. Each entry is covered by a one to five page comics strip by some (usually) noted illustrator. Sergio Aragones, Gahan Wilson, and even Phil Foglio have contributed bits to it.
While flipping through The Big Book of Losers (1997) I noticed that a couple of the “losers” really aren’t anymore. Just give an idea enou8gh time and it might actually be successful. Not people, of course, Milli Vanilli isn’t going to see their fortunes turned around (especially with Pilats dead), and the Edsel may be a collector’s item, but I don’t think anyone thought it was a success.
But “Smokeless Smokes” was an idea whose engineering hadn’t yet come. The R.J. Reynolds Premiere faux cigarette relied on burning and extraordinary suction, and failed. But it was only six years later that the first electronic cigarettes were introduced and were successful. All you needed was that electronic heating.
The Picturephone is another case of an idea whose time hadn’t yet come. The idea of uniting a live picture with the telephone is as old as the telephone itself. The principle was clear enough. What the problem was was having enough bandwidth to transmit a live television image. Bell Telephone struggled mightily to try to make it work in the 1960s and 1970s, but there wasn’t a way to make it cost effective and practical until the steady march of Moore’s law and the installation of the internet system made it possible. Now we have Zoom and Webex and Google Teams and other systems to give you in reality what the promoters had been promising all these years.
The BBoL piece ends with a set of down sides to the picture phone – embarrassing revelations, obscene calls, over-the-phone parenting, that aren’t that different from the kinds of things Mad had suggested in an article circa 1960 . Now that Zoom has arrived we know about embarrassing revelation and the like, but they haven’t killed the system.