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"Cyberpunk worked when the Internet was in its hand-wound crystal radio phase, when you had to be a sort of hobbyist to do e-mail, and it all had a very steep learning curve. Those days are over."
- William Gibson
 |
| Seashell Radio (Thimble Radios) | ||
| Small radios that fit into the ears like hearing aids or ear buds. |
Mildred wears two of them; none of that painful reality stuff for her.
| The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune. Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time. |
| Technovelgy from Fahrenheit 451,
by Ray Bradbury. Published by Doubleday in 1953 Additional resources -
|
A classic description of the human animal in the age of technology.
For a current view of the state-of-the-art in Seashell radios, see the following commercial product - the Lobeman.
It turns out that these radios were not so far off; Bradbury wrote the novel in 1953; take a look at these pictures from Modern Mechanix magazine in November, 1959.
The article describes it as "radios as small as sugar cubes."
An interesting contrast can be made to the green bullet from the same novel; it's a similar technology, but for a different purpose. Check it out!
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Fahrenheit 451
More Ideas
and Technology by Ray Bradbury
Tech news articles related to Fahrenheit 451
Tech news articles related to works by Ray Bradbury
Seashell Radio (Thimble Radios)-related
news articles:
- VeriTouch iVue: Fun, Fashionable Media Player With Military-Grade Encryption
- RF Cochlea Chip 'Seashell Radio'
- Cortana Clip - The New In-Ear Wearables
| Holobox? Who Doesn't Want A Home Hologram? |
| EBS-260 Handjet Free Hand Dot Matrix Printer |
| CD, DVD Bit Rot And PKD's Civic Notification Distorter |
| Zoom Education Idea Is 100 Years Old |
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'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
'...a universal cryptogram — yet it is one which can be interpreted by any intelligent creature on any planet in the Solar System!'
