On 2 September 1956 in the American monthly “Mechanix Illustrated” (born in 1928, last edition in 2001) on the cover, under the main news (how to build, with 500 dollars, a real car, but of wood, able to go to 140 per hour), there was a title that will prove prophetic: “This is what your phone will look like in the future”; and next to it two photos of something that was very far from the phones of the time and that instead looks like our smartphones, a round object like a clock, which was in one hand and had no wires, and which had app icons on the screen or it could become a small portable television.
Inside, the author of the article, Robert Beason, wrote about touch functions, the possibility of making video calls, a voice recognition system. In practice it is as if then, sixty-five years ago, they had already foreseen Siri and Facetime (to quote the Apple world). The prediction was due to a retired AT&T executive, engineer Harold Osborne, who was therefore not simply imagining the future, but telling what his colleagues were planning in the Bell labs. It is instructive to re-read those forecasts today, in some cases very detailed. Some have not – yet – been realized. The first: “The future of solar batteries will be colossal,” says Osborne. The second relates to the fact that one day every child in the world at birth would have an assigned phone number that they would keep for life. It may seem like a missed forecast, but it seems to me just the concept of digital identity.
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