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The iPad's Progenitor — 123 Years Ago
scurtis writes "All technology evolves from cruder predecessors, and tablets are no different. People have been playing with some of the technologies underlying tablet PCs for over a century: In July 1888, for example, inventor Elisha Gray received a US patent for an electrical stylus device that captured handwriting. According to his original application, this 'telautograph' leveraged telegraph technology to send a handwritten message between a sending and receiving station."
I smell a lawsuit. Moses had the first tablets, right? I'm sure he at least copyrighted the term "tablet". Pay up.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
What BS. An ancient handwriting recorder has as much to do with the iPad as does pencil and paper.
...in the mid-80's, we used a similar device to send weather observations from the air traffic control tower I worked at (FYV) to the flight service station across the field. It would literally duplicate every stroke you made on the other end. IIRC, we called it the "electrowriter."
A few years later, they replaced it with a rebadged TI-99A that was "state of the art" for the FAA (and probably cost them thousands of dollars) where we could magically type in our ATIS report, and have them appear at the other end on a little amber monitor with attached thermal printer. High times those were!
Apple's lawyers are filing multiple lawsuits as we type these comments!
I mean, seriously, this is more like a FAX technology than a tablet PC if you ask me.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
It's funny how folk nowadays think that the pads/tablets are something new and innovative. Go Corp had a pen based, handwriting recognition tablet with an innovative GUI on the market back in 1990. However, it was a classic example of a technology looking for a market...which hasn't seemed to develop until 2 decades later.
All Apple's iPad patents are invalid!
It's annoying when people make statements about how they "predicted" something 10 years ago, or someone "invented" something 100 years ago, trying to diminish the accomplishments of what people are doing today.
Am I the only one annoyed that it's obvious from the summary that this device is nothing even remotely like an iPad? How is this even news?
AFAIK it only works with fingers.
The iPad doesn't do anything with handwriting.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
I bet this guy sold it to Steve.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I remember when the Newton first came out and there was a huge line at some trade show (probably Comdex). Word quickly filtered back that the handwriting recognition sucked balls and made it pretty pointless. People started wandering off. I didn't bother waiting and never saw a Newton in the wild. Oddly enough, I saw tons of Palms and I remember you had to learn some quirky shorthand to "write" on it and everyone seemed to embrace that concept despite the earlier refusal to learn how to write on a Newton.
to become a patent troll. He could of set up shop in East Texas.
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
I thought that the iPad's progenitor was the Etch A Sketch.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just has to be capacitive.
C'mon now, trying to find a parallel between a modern computing device like an iPad and a patent involving the telegraph is a bit like trying to give the caveman who invented the wheel partial credit for the design of a Toyota Corolla. Bit too far of a reach if you ask me.
Besides, damn near everything we "invent" these days was birthed out of another idea or seven. Of course the hard proof of this is when you take your "original" invention to the manufacturer only to find out some patent troll already has a dozen patents on "your" design...
That's massive for the tablet form factor. Various eReader fans claim that the iPad, at less than a pounds and a half, is far too heavy to be used comfortably.
Aside from which, it's mostly (but not entirely) pointless without (2).
Anyone remember those things? You know, the ones that scanners and email replaced? This thing was the progenitor of *those*, not the iPad.
Telautographs were used well into the 1970s. You write or draw at one end, and the pen at the other end follows. That's all they do. Railroads used to use them for train orders, which had to be signed. They have zero relationship with the iPad. (The Newton, which had pen input, maybe.)
Early telautographs suffered from the usual problem of pre-vacuum tube electrical devices - they needed signal amplification. That was really hard to do before tubes, let alone transistors. There's a long history of early amplifying devices, all of them awful. Grey's patent shows one mechanical approach. Later (tube) versions used analog audio tones, so they could transmit over phone lines.
I've been looking for one. I sometimes restore antique Teletype equipment, especially pre-1930 machines.
Although this is only like an iPad in the most ostensible sense, I still find it amazing for its time, given what it can do. Really, we still don't have a fax device (i.e. one that you write on and it prints to paper on the other side) that can do anything like this. Sure, we have email, scanners, etc., but this sort of device could be really useful for when you have to fill out a lot of hand-written forms and such remotely. Despite the advent of PDFs and other formats with fillable fields, some forms in use by the US government and various businesses still require actual handwriting. This would also be great for editing a hand-drawn design cooperatively with somebody on the other end. Even though you can do that on a computer, through various input devices, I still find pencil-and-paper far more intuitive. This could also be very cool for messing with D&D and other RPG character sheets if you're teleconferencing an RPG session and aren't using a virtual tabletop. (Some games still aren't supported, or are supported badly. Also, some people just like pencil-and-paper over digital formats for its easy customization and erase-ability.)
Does anybody know why this hasn't been made into a modern equivalent? Was it ever put into production in the 19th and 20th centuries? More than the device itself, I find it amazing that most people have never heard of such a thing, other than its distantly-related tablet PCs and similar. This would have been of great service during the various war efforts before the digital age, and still may be of some use in situations where it's impractical to power a computer or similar (such as in a 3rd-world country where electrical communication lines could be established but power is unreliable--just insert 4 AA batteries!). Given some good encryption, this could have been/could still be used as a sort of Enigma device where practical.
If you see a stylus, they blew it.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Ipad whoring.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Wasn't it the Incas and the Maya who never developed the wheel? It is not an obvious invention, especially as it is useless on its own - you need roads or rails to use it efficiently. "cavemen" didn't invent the wheel - the Stonehenge builders are believed to have used round stones or logs to move the large stones, and they had quite an advanced Bronze Age society. There is a case that the inventor of the actual wheel - with a hub and axle - (and there must actually have been a first one) should have partial credit for modern civilisation. But it was Roman roads that made the wheel so useful. Here in the UK, up until the advent of railways, once you were off what was mainly the Roman road network wheels were of limited use, and water was a far more effective means of transport. The "Great Trek" and the Westward invasion of the US was done at under 2mph.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
that's why patents expire!
Works fine.
So there.