Mark Twain wrote a science fiction story relating the newly invented telephone (plus communication network) in as early as 1898.

When most people think of Mark Twain, they imagine Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn piloting a raft down the Mississippi River to find some trouble to get into. What’s less well-known is that Twain also dabbled in science fiction, so there’s probably a story out there in which Huck Finn finds a spaceship and enjoys a short career of interstellar high jinks and space piracy

It was in one of his science fiction stories, From the ‘London Times’ of 1904, that Twain dreamed up an invention called the “telelectroscope,” which used the phone system to create a world wide network of information-sharing. Basically, Mark Twain invented the Internet. Keep in mind that he wrote this in 1898, when telephones were still fairly new and rare.

Whats even more remarkable was that he successfully predicted most people would be using this network for trivial rubbish.

His story describes “the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues.”

Now check out the description of the guy using it:

“Day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people. … He seldom spoke, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in this amusement.”

Freeky