More accurately 'thought of video dating.'
From Public Domain Review:
The Future Imagined in Albert Robida’s La vie électrique (1890)
Who participated in the first video date? A good couple for candidacy in this regard are Georges Lorris and Estelle Lacombe, who meet via “téléphonoscope” in Albert Robida’s 1890 novel Le Vingtième siècle: la vie électrique in which he imagines “the electric life” of the future. Adding a visual component to two recent technologies, the telephone (1876) and the phonograph (1877), this device lets scattered families in the year 1956 reunite around a virtual dinner table. For the lovebirds Lorris and Lacombe, the téléphonoscope facilitates their unapproved liaison in an immunologically fraught world. (And, for those without a beau, it also offers a service akin to on-demand streaming.)
This proto Zoom / Netflix hybrid is just one of several prescient predictions in Robida’s novel. Frictionless trains shoot through tubes, anticipating the Hyperloop, and doorknockers have been replaced with a “recording phonograph with photographic lens”, allowing residents to both screen visitors and take messages in the event of their absence: a smart doorbell before its time.
Biological weapons are the preferred means of warfare and have been calibrated to spare “men in the prime of their strength and health” and target, instead, “the valetudinarians, the weak, the infirm organisms unable to stand [its] putrid fumes”. (A good capitalist, Georges Lorris’s father, Philox, later secures the monopolistic right to manufacture and distribute both the weapon and its vaccine.) While marriage still exists unmodified, honeymoons are obsolete — now engaged couples take voyages de fiançailles to assess their compatibility. There are even airborne cars and taxicabs, with landing platforms affixed above the flying buttresses of Notre-Dame — as well as mass aerial transit in the form of aéronefs-omnibus....
....MUCH MORE
And previously:
When France Invented The Internet
The reviewer is an Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Université Paris-Sorbonne....
