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Internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee drew his inspiration from science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. (AP Photo/File) |
Quartz
...Mark Twain is best known for all-American novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. But he was also a forward-thinking futurist. Back in 1898, in his short story From The London Times, Twain described a gadget called the Telelectroscope—a “limitless-distance” telephone that connected people around the globe. “By grace of this marvelous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air… Now and then I would hear him say, ‘Give me Hong-Kong’; next, ‘Give me Melbourne’ … Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened.”...link
[Aeneid by Virgil]