{"id":5845,"date":"2015-03-31T09:38:31","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T13:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/?p=5845"},"modified":"2015-03-31T09:38:31","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T13:38:31","slug":"theres-an-app-for-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/2015\/03\/31\/theres-an-app-for-that\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s an app for that"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Eupantophone<\/a>This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material\u00a0from the\u00a0Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Henri Austruy, born in 1871, was an attorney and editor of the journal La nouvelle revue<\/em> from 1913 to 1940, when occupying Nazi forces shut the journal down. 1940 is also the approximate date of Austruy\u2019s unrecorded death, which may have been at the hands of the same forces. During his editorship, Austruy also produced several idiosyncratic works of turn-of-the-century science fiction and fantasy, which used alternate histories and imagined futures to lampoon and allegorize contemporary society. These novels, underappreciated in their time and nearly unknown today, include L\u2019\u00e8re \u201cPetitpaon\u201d, ou, La paix universelle<\/em> (1906). In it, Austruy satirizes his bellicose civilization by describing a near-future world utterly at peace; less than a decade after its publication, Europe would be engulfed in war.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The volume pictured here, L\u2019eupantophone, <\/em>centers around the eponymous machine, a modified phonograph that can automatically convert text to the spoken word, and its inventor, Victor Blancadet. Blancadet, a blind man, further develops his wondrous eupantophone to convert light into sound by modifying vibrations in the ether, allowing him to \u201csee\u201d by means of sound; the main action of the story follows the societal consequences of widespread access to this transformative device. (Another Austruy novel, L\u2019olotelepan<\/em>, also involves a fantastical machine and its effects on humanity; the olotelepan is able to project one\u2019s senses to chosen recipients at any distance.) In the illustration shown here, Blancadet reveals his blindness to an astonished journalist, who mistakes the eupantaphone\u2019s powers of text-to-speech for Blancadet\u2019s ventriloquistic skills.<\/p>\n

\"Eupantophone<\/a><\/p>\n

L\u2019eupantophone<\/em>: FC9.Au797.900e; HOLLIS number 14303711<\/p>\n

Thanks to rare book ca<\/em>taloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring material\u00a0from the\u00a0Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.\u00a0 Henri Austruy, born in 1871, was an attorney and editor of the journal La nouvelle revue from 1913 to 1940, when occupying Nazi forces shut the journal down. 1940 is also the approximate date of Austruy\u2019s unrecorded death, which may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1761,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[64929],"tags":[113736,72720,72627,5055,631,8579],"class_list":["post-5845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-houghton-library","tag-julio-mario-santo-domingo","tag-julio-mario-santo-domingo-collection","tag-santo-domingo-collection","tag-satire","tag-science-fiction","tag-world-war-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5TUly-1wh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1761"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5845"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5853,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5845\/revisions\/5853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/houghtonmodern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}