Friday 2 February 2018

The problem with mobile phones - as predicted by a pre-War Daily Mirror cartoonist

I initially assumed this was a modern parody of how an earlier generation would...

...have reacted to the curse of the cell-phone. But no, it was drawn by William Haselden, who turned to cartooning after 13 unhappy years as a Lloyd's underwriter. He started as a political cartoonist with the Mirror in 1903, but found his true métier producing amiable, multi-panel commentaries on middle-class life. When it came to his powers of prediction - eat your heart out, H.G. Wells.

I've no idea who drew the next one - or when - but it can't have been too long after Haselden's mobile phone premonition:
Not bad, considering that a map of the internet - in its entirety - looked like this in 1973...
...and that Ceefax wouldn't launch until 1974, and that its successor, Digital Text, would take another 27 years to appear. 

Apropos of nothing. this 1839 photograph was the first-ever selfie - I wouldn't... 
...be much surprised to find this chap queuing in a Central London Starbucks (okay, his hair's a bit messy, but he might have been caught in the rain, or spent the whole night partying). According to the New York Post;
On a sunny day in October, Robert Cornelius set up his camera in the back of his father’s gas lamp-importing business on Chestnut Street in Center City, Philadelphia. After removing the lens cap, he sprinted into the frame, where he sat for more than a minute before covering up the lens. The picture he produced that day was the first photographic self-portrait. It is also widely considered the first successful photographic portrait of a human being.

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