Originally shared by Irina T.
“The Victorian age is renowned for the wealth of inventions that helped create the modern era such as the telephone, the typewriter, the bicycle, the electric light, the motor-car, moving pictures, the gramophone and the wireless. The inventor who most captured the public imagination was the American Thomas Edison, who became known as the ‘Wizard of Menlo Park’, after his factory in New Jersey.
[…]
This in turn inspired many writers. Magazines became filled with examples of lone, often eccentric inventors coming up with new, often useless, ideas. For instance amongst the inventions in Van Wagener’s Ways (1898) by W L Alden is a way to make cats fly so they can catch birds more easily, or the perfect balloon which however doesn’t descend. One of the more ingenious inventions was tantamount to the first cyborg in ‘The Ablest Man in the World’ (1879) by Edward Page Mitchell (1852-1927) where an inventor adapts the famous analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage to fit inside a man’s head and creates a genius. In 1890 the first convicted murderer was executed by the electric chair. In ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’ (1892) Arthur Conan Doyle improved the electric chair rather too much so that the victim is supercharged with electricity and seems to have become immortal.”
Excerpted from the linked article
Inventing the future by Mike Ashley/Published 15 May 2014
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/inventing-the-future
