Tom Swift’s Three Inventions of Television: Media History and the Technological Imaginary

Abstract

The article discusses three fictional narratives of inventions of televisual devices, which appeared in a popular American boys’ books series about a young inventor-adventurer in 1914, 1928 and 1933. It considers these narratives as representations of the ‘technological imaginary’ of television – that is, the ideas about the possibilities of the technology that were entertained before its material realization and informed its eventual formation. A comparison between the three different manners in which the novels depict the fictional inventions demonstrates how the early imaginaries of television were conceived and articulated in response to the continuously changing intermedial context of the early twentieth century.