Note 5 — Chapter V · THE NEWSPAPER OF THE FUTURE, AND THE FUTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER

The amount of verbal description needed will thus be much diminished. Where an event can be long anticipated—when it is an event like the Delhi Durbar or the christening of the Czarewitch, for instance—elaborate preparations will be made, and very perfect results published. And difficulties of merely photographic detail, which at present restrict rapid photography to events in full sunlight, having been overcome, and instantaneous photography by artificial light having been made possible, such an event as an important theatrical production in London will be pictorially reported in the New York and San Francisco papers next morning. Where an event is of an unexpected character—such as a great fire, a riot, or some sudden cataclysm of Nature—the teleautoscope will still be employed with great advantage. Take, for instance, the case of some large public building or some theatre destroyed by fire—though fires will not be so frequent in the new age as they are to-day. The local newspaper artists will select from their portfolios photographs of the building kept on hand for such occasions and get to work on them with paint-box and colours, depicting the progress of what they will perhaps still cling sufficiently to tradition to call the “conflagration”; and they will transmit these efforts when it is not possible to transmit actual photographs of the event. And of course, when all is over, the ruins will be photographed in colours from every desirable standpoint, and the descriptive photographer will, in a great measure, supplant the penny-a-liner. Many pieces of news will doubtless be photographed from the small one-man air-carriages, the employment of which, as a means of recreation, we have already foreseen.5