Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone or the Picture That Saved a Fortune

Appleton, VictorProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
225K words
Chapters
23

Tags

English Originals Science FictionChildren's Literature InventionVisual CommunicationScience EnlightenmentScience FantasyMystery SolvingGrowing UpResourceful BraveryBook SeriesBoyhood AdventureYouth Reading

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone or the Picture That Saved a Fortune by AppletonAuthor: Appleton, Victor,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Oct 1, 2003

Editor's review

This young inventor adventure novel comes from Victor Appleton's Tom Swift series. Using the early idea of a photo telephone as its hook, it weaves technological imagination and puzzle-solving adventure into a compact reading experience. The work shows both the young protagonist tinkering with equipment and circuits and a suspense plot unfolding around a single photograph, offering a glimpse of early twentieth-century popular fiction's enthusiasm and optimism about emerging technology. As a public-domain eBook, it preserves the original language and chapter rhythm; it is not long and serves as an accessible sample for understanding the tradition of American juvenile adventure fiction. Readers might treat it as a historical slice of technological imagination: observe how the author, without today's communications conditions, conceived the feasibility of image transmission, and how character action turns technological ideas into dramatic conflict. Researchers may compare it with similar juvenile series; general readers will find it a brisk old-fashioned adventure story, suitable for continuous reading in spare moments.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the first two chapters to grasp the character relationships and central suspense, then proceed in chapter order without skipping.
  2. Pause briefly at passages describing technological ideas and make simple notes comparing them with today's communications methods to enhance reading enjoyment.
  3. For research, read alongside juvenile series novels of the same period and note their narrative formulas and period discourse.
  4. For long English sentences, first read for the paragraph's general meaning, then return to details, avoiding interruptions in rhythm caused by unfamiliar words.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23

FAQ

Which installment in the series is this book, and must it be read in order? The material only identifies it as one volume in the Tom Swift series and does not give a specific number. The volumes mostly feature independent adventures and usually do not require strict reading order; to understand the character background, one may read earlier works in the series first and then return to this book.
Does the photo telephone idea in the book have a basis in real technology? The material provides no technical verification. From general public-domain knowledge, it is an imaginative depiction of image transmission in early twentieth-century popular fiction and should not be read as real invention history. Readers may regard it as literary imagination from an age of technological optimism rather than an engineering record.
How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for non-native readers? The material does not indicate language difficulty. As early juvenile adventure fiction, its sentences are usually fairly direct but contain period expressions and technical vocabulary. Readers with intermediate English reading ability can read it through with a dictionary; beginners are advised to read chapter summaries first before entering the original text.

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About the author

Appleton, Victor Author

Victor Appleton is the credited author of the Tom Swift series of juvenile science-adventure novels. Public information about his real identity is limited, and the name is generally understood to be a pen name used by a team of writers organized by the publisher. The library holds 31 of his works, covering subjects such as motor-boats, electric rifles, airships, sky racers, submarines, electric runabouts and air gliders. The protagonists often embark on adventures through their inventions, combining scientific imagination with a sense of adventure. These works are known for their brisk pacing and rich imagination, and they have had a certain influence on twentieth-century juvenile science and technology reading.