Editor’s Desk
Foresight holds such sweet sorrow
Forget about the benefit of hindsight – what about the sweet foresight; seeing the future on a foggy day.Come on, you can’t tell me you haven’t wished to have invested long ahead of everyone else in the money maker of the century. Instead of following the pack into a saturated market.
Well, if you had really sharp foresight you could have made plans ahead of the rest of mankind to make a killing by being first in the market and making a billion.
That look into the future of mobile phones came and went, as quickly as the turn of a page, in a small-town newspaper in Nottingham, England, nearly 60 years ago.
The revelation came in the grey news pages of the Mansfield New-Journal, April 18, 1963, that announced the coming of the mobile phone. What a different world it was then, Nelson Mandela had not long started his 27 years in prison; JFK was President of the United States and Zimbabwe had exactly 17 years to wait until its independence.
“Right now, it’s a laboratory development and it’s workable, allowing the carrier to make and answer calls wherever he may be,” the newspaper said.
The report also alluded to the birth of Bluetooth, even though the name had never even been thought of.
“Other telephones of the future include a kitchen loud-speaking telephone and a visual image telephone. The visual image telephone allows the parties to converse by way of a microphone and loudspeaker while a miniature television camera transmits the . The “TV phone” also will have a writer signature transmission and a conversation tape recorder.”
Imagine, if you were a far-sighted entrepreneur and you read that; you would have put the newspaper down and picked up the telephone to make plans.
For a start, most people around the world didn’t have telephones in those days. Plus you would have to have found someone to invent and mass produce microchips to make the phones small enough to carry. Then someone would have had to build cell phone towers and create the internet to help speed the signal.
If you could do all of that yourself – you deserve a medal for entrepreneurism above and beyond the call of duty.
Even then, the banks would probably laugh at you and tell you that no one is going to make money from something that hasn’t been invented yet. The best you could do would be to save your own pennies ready to invest when technology caught up with the dream.
If only banks had foresight too, if only.
