[Quirky Quokka]

In regards to the discussion of computers:  it's generally agreed that computers and the internet are the big development that science fiction missed... you can find plenty of stories that have items you can squint at and sort of see, but it was never something that was really developed back then. 

I see that Panther has given a few examples re computers. However, I did find it amusing that 500 years of development had given the Han incredible cities and rockets, but their communication system still wasn't much better than a glorified telegraph system.

Thanks again, OtherEric, for this trip down the road of sci-fi classics.

Cheers

QQ

[The Australian Panther]

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=96311
August 1928 issue of AMAZING STORIES.
Armageddon- 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan.
Making notes as I go.
Interesting that in 1928 he already mentions Television.
> Another war had followed the first world war. Got that right.
> nearly all the European nations had banded together to break the financial and industrial power of america.
Happening now?
> Disintergrator Rays. Is this the story that introduced that concept?
The description of the 'undertrees' American society is like a combination of Mad Max and (with the disintergrator rays) war of the worlds.
He doesn't seem to have thought it through, but they seem to have invented antigravity.
They have mobile phones.
'It had no special receiver for the ear. Wilma simply threw back the lid, as if she was opening a book, and began to talk.'   
He knows about the Irish, but aparently doesn't know about the Celts.   
"they might be 12 miles up, out of sight but looking at us with a projecto.' Satellite technology?
"The Big bosses have just had a national ultraphone council"  Phone hookups?
"The Rocket may be made to travel in an arc, over intervening obstacles, To an unseen target."
Well predicted.
For a modern reader, there is just too much exposition, you need patience to read the entire story.
Very interesting!
Thanks OtherEric for bringing it too our attention.
Cheers!   

[OtherEric]

While I'm at it, '1946' also contains the story 'Memorial' by Theodore Sturgeon. Been trying to find this one again for decades. Literally.

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41161

There's the ISDFB listing for the story, telling you where it's been reprinted.

I think I've got a copy of Science Fiction Terror Tales in the other room, I'll see if I can dig it up to read myself.

[crashryan]

Disintegrator Rays. Is this the story that introduced that concept?

I wondered that, too, especially considering Nowlan put the word in italics, the way they did for foreign words and unusual terms. Interestingly, despite almost a century of disintegrators the dictionary and spell check don't recognize the word. Only integrator.

Interesting that in 1928 he already mentions Television.

That led me to research "television" and I learned some amazing facts. The following was gleaned from Wikipedia.

The word television dates from 1900(!). It was introduced by a Russian scientist who speculated about picture transmission in a paper for the First International Congress of Electricity.

The first demonstration of the live transmission of images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909.The 8x8 pixel resolution in their proof-of-concept demonstration was just sufficient to clearly transmit individual letters of the alphabet. An updated image was transmitted "several times" each second.

In 1911, Boris Rosing and Vladimir Zworykin created a system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit crude images over wires to a "Braun tube" (cathode-ray tube) in the receiver. However moving images were not possible.

By the 1920s, amplification made television practical. Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion at Selfridges's department store in London. Since human faces had inadequate contrast to show up on his primitive system, he televised a ventriloquist's dummy named "Stooky Bill," whose painted face had higher contrast, talking and moving. By 26 January 1926, he had demonstrated before members of the Royal Institution the transmission of an image of a face in motion by radio. This is widely regarded as the world's first true public television demonstration.

But the biggest surprise was learning that in Baird's system, the rotating disc unit which both scanned and displayed the image, had been developed and patented by a German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow...in 1884!

[OtherEric]

In fact, Station WRNY in New York was making early experimental TV broadcasts in August 1928, the same month this issue is dated.  Hugo Gernsback, the editor/ owner of Amazing Stories at this point, owned the station as well.  You can see it mentioned at the top of the front cover.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WRNY_(New_York_City)

In the UK, the BBC started broadcasting TV in 1936, although it stopped in 1939 for fear the transmissions could act as a beacon for attacking German planes.  The last broadcast before shutting down was a cartoon, Mickey's Gala Premier.  Famously, when it went back on the air in 1946, another showing of the cartoon was one of the first things they ran.  (The idea that they cut the broadcast off mid-cartoon in 1939 and resumed at the same point in 1946 is just an urban legend, however.)

[Quirky Quokka]

CrashRyan said:

By the 1920s, amplification made television practical. Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion at Selfridges's department store in London. Since human faces had inadequate contrast to show up on his primitive system, he televised a ventriloquist's dummy named "Stooky Bill," whose painted face had higher contrast, talking and moving. By 26 January 1926, he had demonstrated before members of the Royal Institution the transmission of an image of a face in motion by radio. This is widely regarded as the world's first true public television demonstration.

But the biggest surprise was learning that in Baird's system, the rotating disc unit which both scanned and displayed the image, had been developed and patented by a German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow...in 1884!

Here's some trivia for the day. The annual television awards in Australia (like the American Emmys) are called the Logies, after John Logie Baird. Maybe we should call it the Nipkows 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logie_Awards

Cheers

QQ

[Robb_K]

I agree with a lot of the posts on this thread, and they covered just about every aspect, So I can't think of much to add.  I grew up reading the Science Fiction/Fantasy novels of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Alan Poe (not really Sci-Fi but had some similar features), and read some other primitive futuristic stories, so I had to decide whether or not I could enjoy them, even when they seemed to defy logic and what I had thought I had learned about The Universe through my own senses.  And yes, although as a scientist living in times later than the early science fantasy stories were written, I learned more about the physical sciences than those authors knew, I could still read and enjoy them.  That might seem strange to those of you who have read my reviews of the older comic books complaining that those authors should have researched the science on subjects they touched upon in their stories.  But I only complained about authors who wrote scenarios that defied logic so drastically that they were almost too silly to take seriously enough to enjoy.  I've read up through most of the 12 chapters.  As mentioned by a few posters, I felt that there was too much explanation about how things worked, especially when it was drawing too much attention to the lack of logic involved in the premises. And I think the description of what  The World of The 25th Century was like, drowned out the "story" of the protagonists with whom readers should be identifying.  It felt more like a travel log than a story of a man who was ripped from his time and World, and trapped in a distant future time.  I much prefer the space adventures of Buck Rogers to this "background story".  But it was interesting to rerad the story which was the genesis for The "Buck Rogers" series.

[The Australian Panther]

Robb said,

And I think the description of what  The World of The 25th Century was like, drowned out the "story" of the protagonists with whom readers should be identifying.  It felt more like a travel log than a story of a man who was ripped from his time and World, and trapped in a distant future time.

Exactly.
He should have read Burroughs fantasies of men ripped out of our world and dumped into other fantastic worlds. Burroughs is justly famous because he didn't make that mistake.

thanks Robb.   

[Quirky Quokka]

Robb said,

And I think the description of what  The World of The 25th Century was like, drowned out the "story" of the protagonists with whom readers should be identifying.  It felt more like a travel log than a story of a man who was ripped from his time and World, and trapped in a distant future time.

Exactly.
He should have read Burroughs fantasies of men ripped out of our world and dumped into other fantastic worlds. Burroughs is justly famous because he didn't make that mistake.

thanks Robb.

Yes, agree with both of you. Tony/Buck coped remarkably well for someone who had awoken to find his whole world upended. He seemed to take it all in his stride.

Cheers

QQ