In an 1898 short story titled “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” Mark Twain introduced an electrical instrument called the telectroscope. Machines for transmitting vision at a distance, telectroscopes had been speculated about since the invention of the telephone in 1876. Over the next quarter of a century, numerous inventors were credited with its imminent, but never realized, production. No such instrument was ever actually built, and it now usually appears only in footnotes to television’s prehistory. Nevertheless, the telectroscope offers useful insights into the way the Victorian future was constructed out of assemblages of fact and fiction. In this chapter I chart the ways in which the instrument moved back and forth across the boundaries of the real. Precisely because it never existed, I suggest, the telectroscope offers an excellent example of the ways the Victorian future was made out of its own material culture.

中文翻译：

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展望未来：

在 1898 年的短篇小说《来自 1904 年的伦敦时报》中，马克吐温介绍了一种称为电镜的电子仪器。自 1876 年电话发明以来，人们一直在推测用于远距离传输视觉的机器——验电器。在接下来的 25 年里，许多发明家都认为它即将生产，但从未实现。从来没有真正建造过这样的仪器，现在它通常只出现在电视史前史的脚注中。然而，验电器提供了有用的见解，了解维多利亚时代的未来是如何从事实和虚构的组合中构建出来的。在本章中，我绘制了仪器在真实边界上来回移动的方式。正是因为它从未存在过，我建议，