Someone Should Invent A Pocket Telephone

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22928 – 1016

Here’s the haps:

I had seen the cartoon below written about in a couple of different places but really didn’t think very much of it. I had in my mind that it was a hoax of some sort. Very clever but the sources given were from Wikipedia so I was skeptical. But, when I did a little homework I discovered a site published by the University of Kent called the British Cartoon Archive dedicated to the history of British cartooning for over 200 years (I believe the intent is to say that British cartooning is over 200 years old, not the website because that would go back to before Al Gore invented the Internet.).

From 1904 to 1940 there was a cartoonist that worked mainly for the Daily Mirror but also for Punch whose name was W. K. Haselden. In his lifetime he published over 6,000 cartoons. He covered a broad range of topics from politics to everyday life. Of course, some of his drawings do reflect the social mores of his day so some of his depictions may be considered offensive but even those, (not putting him into the context of his time) are very few. I put his name into the search and there were over 6,000 entries so in the advanced search I put the word telephone and came up with 16 entries.

Published March 5th, 1919 I thought this was pretty spot on:

18 Comments

  1. Actually, WVH is a Time Lord also known as Dr. What and visited me next year. He will have said that his cartoon was intended to be a news report, but the Brits did not believe him when he said this would all happen. He would have been famous for his predictions, seeing as he had already seen our future, but Dr. Who accidentally killed him in 1898 when their Tardises collided. Since he had already visited me next year, I would have had my great-great grandfather send flowers to his funeral, but it was to be held on Balhoon just before the End of the World and gramps didn’t have the necessary TL stamp on his visa, and Al Gore refused to loan him any pantyhose, anyway, so he would have been underdressed.

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