Introduction

Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone is a work of fiction written in 1914 and it is one of many in a Series of Science Fiction Novels. The series has more than 100 volumes and thus must have been well received.

The very early foundations of Modern Phones, the Science of Radio and the Engineering of Telecommunications Infrastructure were figuratively and literally being laid down by the start of the 20th Century. However, Modern Digital Telecommunications Technology has its origins in the middle of the 20th Century starting with the invention of Digital Computers. Telecommunication technology would come to experience immense progress and continue to be developed all throughout the latter half of the 20th Century.

While inventions and progress in long distance communication technology would come to revolutionize the world, creating and shaping the world we know today, many formative shapes and forms of communication devices were already being cast in the late 20th century. Yet, early attempts at commercialization of these Telecommunications devices would be met with low rates of adoption even though the devices that we have today are ultimately not too dissimilar from the devices that were trying to change the world in the late 20th century.

Nonetheless, Telecommunication technology had come a long way from the late 19th century and it would eventually become the Technology of Smart Phones and the Internet we know today. As the quote above from Tom Swift and His Photo Phone (1914) demonstrates, contemporary video conferencing provided by Software Applications like Zoom, Facetime, Skype, or Discord that are run on today's Laptops and Smart Phones was not just fiction but fantasy merely a century ago.