We live in the age of the smart­phone, which took more than a few of us by sur­prise. But in all human his­to­ry, not a sin­gle piece of tech­nol­o­gy has actu­al­ly come out of nowhere. Long before smart­phones came on the mar­ket in the 2000s, those close to the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­try had a sense of what form its most wide­ly used device would even­tu­al­ly take. “Here is my prophe­cy: In its final devel­op­ment, the tele­phone will be car­ried about by the indi­vid­ual, per­haps as we car­ry a watch today,” said Pacif­ic Tele­phone and Tele­graph Com­pa­ny direc­tor Mark R. Sul­li­van in 1953. “It prob­a­bly will require no dial or equiv­a­lent and I think the users will be able to see each oth­er, if they want, as they talk. Who knows but it may actu­al­ly trans­late from one lan­guage to anoth­er?”

Sul­li­van’s pre­scient-sound­ing words sur­vive in the clip­ping of the Asso­ci­at­ed Press arti­cle seen at the top of the post. It’s worth remem­ber­ing that the speech in ques­tion dates from a time when the rotary phone was the most advanced per­son­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion device in Amer­i­can house­holds.

Just three years ear­li­er, writes KQED’s Rae Alexan­dra, Sul­li­van “appeared in the San Fran­cis­co Exam­in­er talk­ing about the lat­est inno­va­tions in tele­phone tech­nol­o­gy. The advance­ment he was most proud of was a new device about the size of a small type­writer that auto­mat­i­cal­ly cal­cu­lat­ed how long people’s phone calls were.” How­ev­er log­i­cal, pock­et tele­phones with video-call­ing and trans­la­tion capa­bil­i­ties would then have struck many as the stuff of sci­ence fic­tion.

Though born before the time of house­hold elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, Sul­li­van him­self lived just long enough to see the debut of the first com­mer­cial cell­phone  “The Motoro­la DynaT­AC 8000X was def­i­nite­ly not watch-sized and cost a whop­ping $3,995 in 1983 (about $11,000 today),” writes Alexan­dra, “but Sul­li­van might have seen this devel­op­ment as a step towards his long-ago vision — a sign that every one of his 1953 pre­dic­tions would even­tu­al­ly come to fruition.” As print­ed in the Taco­ma News Tri­bune, the AP arti­cle con­vey­ing those pre­dic­tions to the pub­lic appeared under the head­line “There’ll Be No Escape in Future from Tele­phones,” which sounds even more chill­ing today — in that very future — than it did near­ly 70 years ago. But then, even the visions of actu­al sci­ence fic­tion are sel­dom whol­ly untrou­bled.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones (1923)

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Pho­tog­ra­phy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Stephen Fry loves tech­nol­o­gy. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve fea­tured his inves­ti­ga­tions into every­thing from cloud com­put­ing to nanoscience to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and sim­u­la­tion the­o­ry. “I have nev­er seen a smart­phone I haven’t bought,” he wrote in 2007, the year Apple’s iPhone came out. But the iPhone would sure­ly nev­er have been if not for the Mac­in­tosh, the third of which ever sold in the Unit­ed King­dom went to Fry. (His fel­low British technophile Dou­glas Adams had already snagged the first two.) And there would­n’t have been a Mac­in­tosh — a stretch though this may seem — if not for the print­ing press, which by some reck­on­ings set off the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion that car­ries us along to this day.

The his­to­ry of the print­ing press is thus, in a sense, a his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy in micro­cosm. In the hour­long doc­u­men­tary The Machine that Made Us, Fry seeks out an under­stand­ing of the inven­tion, the work­ings, and the evo­lu­tion of the device that, as he puts it, “shaped the mod­ern world.”

The use of mov­able type to run off many copies of a text goes back to 11th-cen­tu­ry Chi­na, strict­ly speak­ing, but only in Europe did it first flour­ish to the point of giv­ing rise to mass media. In order to place him­self at the begin­ning of that par­tic­u­lar sto­ry, Fry trav­els to Mainz in mod­ern-day Ger­many, birth­place of a cer­tain Johannes Guten­berg, whose edi­tion of the Bible from the 1450s isn’t just the ear­li­est mass-pro­duced book but the most impor­tant one as well.

Fry may not have a straight­for­ward rela­tion­ship with reli­gion, but he does under­stand well the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of Guten­berg’s Bible-print­ing enter­prise. And he comes to under­stand that enter­prise itself more deeply while fol­low­ing the “Guten­berg trail,” retrac­ing the steps of the man him­self as he assem­bled the resources to put his inven­tion into action. Since none of the press­es Guten­berg built sur­vive today (though at least one func­tion­ing approx­i­mate mod­el does exist), Fry involves him­self in recon­struct­ing an exam­ple. He also vis­its a paper mill and a type foundry whose crafts­men make their mate­ri­als with the same meth­ods used in the 15th cen­tu­ry. The fruit of these com­bined labors is a sin­gle repli­ca page of the Guten­berg Bible: a reminder of what brought about the eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, and cul­tur­al real­i­ty we still inhab­it these 570 years lat­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

The Old­est Book Print­ed with Mov­able Type is Not The Guten­berg Bible: Jikji, a Col­lec­tion of Kore­an Bud­dhist Teach­ings, Pre­dat­ed It By 78 Years and It’s Now Dig­i­tized Online

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Stephen Fry Pro­files Six Russ­ian Writ­ers in the New Doc­u­men­tary Russia’s Open Book

Stephen Fry Intro­duces the Strange New World of Nanoscience

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Just last week I vis­it­ed Nia­gara Falls and beheld the noble-look­ing stat­ue of Niko­la Tes­la installed there. It struck me as a fit­ting trib­ute to the inven­tor of the Death Ray. But then, its pres­ence prob­a­bly had more to do with Tes­la’s hav­ing advised the builders of the falls’ pow­er plant to use two-phase alter­nat­ing cur­rent, the form of elec­tric­i­ty of which he’s now remem­bered as a pio­neer. And in any case, Tes­la nev­er actu­al­ly invent­ed a death ray, or at least he nev­er demon­strat­ed one. He did, how­ev­er, claim to have been work­ing on a sys­tem he called “tele­force,” which shot what he described as a “death beam” — rays, he insist­ed, would nev­er be fea­si­ble — both “thin­ner than a hair” and pow­er­ful enough to “destroy any­thing approach­ing with­in 200 miles,” mak­ing war­fare effec­tive­ly obso­lete.

These pro­nounce­ments attract­ed spe­cial media atten­tion in the 1930s. “Hype about the weapon real­ly took off in the run-up to World War II as Nazi Ger­many assem­bled a fear­some air force,” writes Sam Kean at the Sci­ence His­to­ry Insti­tute. “Peo­ple in Tesla’s home­land, then called Yugoslavia, begged him to return home and install the rays to pro­tect them from the Nazi men­ace.” But no known evi­dence sug­gests that the elder­ly Tes­la had fig­ured out how to actu­al­ly make tele­force work.

At that point he had more press­ing prob­lems, not least the cost of the hotels in which he lived. “In 1915, his famous War­den­clyffe tow­er plant was sold to help pay off his $20,000 debt at the Wal­dorf-Asto­ria,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Sta­cy Con­radt, and lat­er he racked up a sim­i­lar­ly large bill at the Gov­er­nor Clin­ton. “He couldn’t afford the pay­ment, so instead, Tes­la offered the man­age­ment some­thing price­less: one of his inven­tions.”

That “inven­tion” may have been the box exam­ined after Tes­la’s death in 1943 by physi­cist John G. Trump (uncle of for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump). Left in a hotel vault, it was rumored to be “a pro­to­type of his death ray.” Tes­la had includ­ed a note, writes Kean, that “claimed the pro­to­type inside was worth $10,000. More omi­nous­ly, it said the box would det­o­nate if opened incor­rect­ly.” But when “the physi­cist steeled him­self and began tear­ing off the brown paper,” he “must have laughed at what he saw under­neath: a Wheat­stone bridge, a tool for mea­sur­ing elec­tri­cal resis­tance. It was a com­mon, mun­dane device — some old junk, real­ly. It was cer­tain­ly not a death ray, not even close.”

Though it must have been as pow­er­ful a dis­ap­point­ment as it was a relief, did that dis­cov­ery prove that Tes­la nev­er invent­ed a death ray? The U.S. gov­ern­ment did­n’t take its chances on the mat­ter: as History.com’s Sarah Pruitt tells it, agents “swooped in and took pos­ses­sion of all the prop­er­ty and doc­u­ments from his room at the New York­er Hotel” right after Tes­la’s death. And “while the FBI orig­i­nal­ly record­ed some 80 trunks among Tesla’s effects, only 60 arrived in Bel­grade,” home of the Niko­la Tes­la Muse­um, near­ly a decade lat­er. The idea of death rays has long sur­vived Tes­la him­self, tak­ing on forms from the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion’s “Star Wars” nuclear defense pro­gram to the mil­i­tary laser weapons test­ed in recent years. Few such tech­nolo­gies seem capa­ble of end­ing all war, as Tes­la promised. But if one ever does, we could hon­or his mem­o­ry by refer­ring to it, in the man­ner he pre­ferred, as not a death ray but a death beam.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1926, Niko­la Tes­la Pre­dicts the World of 2026

The Elec­tric Rise and Fall of Niko­la Tes­la: As Told by Tech­noil­lu­sion­ist Mar­co Tem­pest

Niko­la Tes­la Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed the Rise of the Inter­net & Smart Phone in 1926

Mark Twain Plays With Elec­tric­i­ty in Niko­la Tesla’s Lab (Pho­to, 1894)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

For 60 years now, the name Edsel has been syn­ony­mous with fail­ure. In a way, this vin­di­cates the posi­tion of Hen­ry Ford II, who opposed label­ing a brand of cars with the name of his father Edsel Ford. The son of Ford Motor Com­pa­ny founder Hen­ry Ford, Edsel Ford died young in 1943, and thus did­n’t live to see “E Day,” the roll­out of his name­sake line of auto­mo­biles. It hap­pened on Sep­tem­ber 4, 1957, the cul­mi­na­tion of two years of research and devel­op­ment on what was for most of that time called the “E car,” the let­ter hav­ing been cho­sen to indi­cate the pro­jec­t’s exper­i­men­tal nature. Alas, all sev­en of Edsel’s first mod­els struck the Amer­i­can pub­lic as too con­ven­tion­al to stand out — and at the same time, too odd to buy.

You can hear the sto­ry of Edsel in the two videos above, one from trans­porta­tion enthu­si­ast Ruairidh MacVeigh and anoth­er from Reg­u­lar Car Reviews. Both offer expla­na­tions of how the brand’s cars were con­ceived, and what went wrong enough in their exe­cu­tion to make them a laugh­ing stock still today. No Edsel post­mortem can fail to con­sid­er the name itself, a choice made in des­per­a­tion after the rejec­tion of more than 6,000 oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties pre­sent­ed by the adver­tis­ing firm of Foote, Cone & Beld­ing.

Its man­ag­er of mar­ket­ing research also unof­fi­cial­ly sought the coun­sel of mod­ernist poet Mar­i­anne Moore, whose sug­ges­tions includ­ed “Utopi­an Turtle­top,” “Resilient Bul­let,” “Mon­goose Civique,” and “The Impec­ca­ble.”

Anoth­er fac­tor cit­ed as a cause of Edsel’s dis­ap­point­ing sales is its cars’ sig­na­ture ver­ti­cal grille, derid­ed ear­ly on for its shape resem­bling a horse col­lar — among oth­er, less men­tion­able things. Such aes­thet­ic mis­steps may not have sunk the brand on their own, but they cer­tain­ly did­n’t coun­ter­act the effects of oth­er, more mun­dane con­di­tions. These includ­ed per­sis­tent assem­bly-line prob­lems (with­out a ded­i­cat­ed fac­to­ry, Edsels tend­ed occa­sion­al­ly to come out with parts improp­er­ly installed or absent) and a 1957 eco­nom­ic reces­sion that made upper-mid­dle-tier auto­mo­biles of this kind unap­peal­ing to the Amer­i­can dri­ver. Even the top-rat­ed CBS tele­vi­sion spe­cial The Edsel Show — despite its per­for­mances from the likes of Bing Cros­by, Frank Sina­tra, Rose­mary Clooney, and Louis Arm­strong — drummed up lit­tle pub­lic enthu­si­asm.

Edsel last­ed only from 1958 to 1960, in which time Ford man­u­fac­tured 118,287 of its cars in total. Six decades after the mark’s retire­ment, few­er than 10,000 Edsel cars sur­vive — most of them as sought-after col­lec­tor’s items. For Edsels now have their appre­ci­a­tors, as evi­denced by the video above from pro­fes­sion­al mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­cana enthu­si­ast Charles Phoenix, who mar­vels over every fea­ture of a 1958 Cita­tion, Edsel’s top-of-the-line mod­el, from its Tele­touch push-but­ton gear selec­tor to its cus­tomiz­able speed-warn­ing indi­ca­tor. (Seat­belts came stan­dard, despite being option­al extras on oth­er cars of the day.) Cur­rent Edsel own­ers also include lifestyle guru Martha Stew­art, who showed off her mint 1958 Roundup in a recent video with Jay Leno — though she seems rather proud­er of also own­ing Edsel Ford’s house.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Muse­um of Fail­ure: A Liv­ing Shrine to New Coke, the Ford Edsel, Google Glass & Oth­er Epic Cor­po­rate Fails

A Fly­ing Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Tay­lor Aero­car in Action

A Hulk­ing 1959 Chevy Bel Air Gets Oblit­er­at­ed by a Mid-Size 2009 Chevy Mal­ibu in a Crash Test

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.