Not long ago a popular writer on electricity made this startling prediction of coming wonders: “Lovers conversing at a great distance will behold each other as in the flesh. Doctors will examine patients’ tongues in another city, and the poor will enjoy visual trips wherever their fancy inclines. In hot weather, too, Alpine glaciers and arctic snows will be made visible in sweltering cities, and when piercing northeast winds do blow, we shall gloat over tropical vistas of orchids and palms.”

This is no dream. The new “telephotograph” invention of Dr. Arthur Korn, Professor of Physics in Munich University, is a distinct step nearer the realization of all this, and he assures us that “television,” or seeing by telegraph, is merely a question of a year or two with certain improvements in apparatus.

And then it will surely be possible for the eminent surgeon in New York to see a bullet embedded in the body of a patient in Chicago or San Francisco…

– The New York Times, February 24, 1907.