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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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| Voice-Clock | ||
| A clock that could state the time out loud. |
I included this item because I thought that it might be an early use of this idea.
| In the living room the voice-clock, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time get up, seven o'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would.
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes. Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! |
| Technovelgy from The Martian Chronicles,
by Ray Bradbury. Published by Various in 1950 Additional resources -
|
This item comes from the story There Will Come Soft Rains, published in 1950.
I was surprised to find that the talking clock was one of the earliest proposed uses of the Edison 'talking machine', also known as the phonograph. Thomas Edison signed a contract with the Ansonia Clock Company on January 7, 1878 to develop a talking clock using the phonograph.
It turns out that one of the original lead cylinders survives from 1878, and is probably the world's oldest playable recording. Read a bit more at early talking machines.
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
