1935 and the ancestor of the iPad

A few hours after the official presentation of the iPad 3, the third generation of a device that willy-nilly has revolutionized our way of enjoying the multimedia content on-the-go, we can reflect with a smile on the distant roots of a similar evolution.

How many times we try to imagine the future? In movies, books, or just well, pour parler. Here, we are certainly not the first to do it: especially after the industrial revolution and the advent of some of the inventions that changed our history, the imagination of scholars and men of art has become so fervent to venture many predictions, some pretty accurate, others totally wrong but still fascinating.

The blog cites a Paleofuture the conviction of Thomas Edison that the books of the future would be printed on sheets of nickel or the prediction of 1959 that he wanted the books projected on the ceiling of the house. It then proposes to us this image of 1935: appeared in the magazine "Everyday Science and Mechanics", the illustration shows a device that would allow the reading and listening to music while sitting comfortably in an armchair, watching a screen substantially.

Ok, the design is not quite the same and in any case we are not talking about a device on-the-go, but the similarities with our tablet "of the future" (or the e-book reader) are others: the presence of a screen that filters and especially the use of content in the comfort of "multimedia" entertainment. Basically this is the main role of the tablet, in any case different from that of a PC: The tablet in fact born EXCLUSIVELY for personal recreation. How this thing, but that has never seen the light beyond the newspaper page.