Featured on PDR in the collection The Telephonoscope (1879)

The cartoon above is from the pen of George du Maurier, printed in the Punch Almanack for 1879. Although titled "Edison's Telephonoscope" it is not, in fact, a creation of Thomas Edison's at all (either realised or proposed) but rather an imagining by Maurier of what the great inventor might come up with next: a machine which, for all intents and purposes, amounts to some kind of Victorian Zoom. A mother and father — the "Pater- and Materfamilias" — sit at home and converse with, while also viewing, their children at play across the other side of the world. The caption reads: