TELEVISION

Broadside (25 x 10 in.), creases where previously folded. 

Illustrated in: Corn, Joseph & Brian Horrigan. Yesterday's Tomorrows. Past Visions of the American Future. New York: Summit Books for the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service, 1984, p. 25

A comical broadside issued by the Artwin Newscorp Company in 1929, depicting a housewife using a television, which had first been successfully demonstrated in 1927, to discover her husband's reason for working late at the office. 

Nothing ignited imaginations like the invention of the television. It was envisioned by many to be a future two-way communication system, and in the minds of some, a surveillance tool. This idea can be seen in E.M. Forster's 1909 short story The Machine Stops, depicting a world in which humans live in total isolation from each other, communicating via television (the story in fact also eerily predicts the use of the internet and instant messaging), as well as later in George Orwell's 1984, in which television surveillance and totalitarian social control are combined to produce the spectre of "Big Brother."