In 1936, television was a laboratory curiosity. Regular broadcasting had barely begun — the BBC launched its first scheduled TV service that same year, reaching a few hundred sets in London. Most people had never seen a television picture. Radio was king. The cinema was the dominant visual medium. And yet, tucked into the foreword of a technical manual for building your own cathode ray tube receiver, a German engineer named Manfred von Ardenne made a quiet, almost offhand prediction that now reads like prophecy:

Perhaps in ten or twenty years' time, in the course of its development, television will occupy a place alongside broadcasting and the cinema as an equally important time-absorbing factor.

He was exactly right — and then some. By 1956, twenty years later, television had not merely joined radio and cinema as an "equally important time-absorbing factor." It had devoured them both. American households with televisions jumped from under 1% in 1946 to over 85% by 1959. Radio drama was dead. Movie theater attendance had plummeted. Television didn't sit alongside its older siblings — it ate them alive.

But what makes von Ardenne's prediction remarkable isn't just its accuracy. It's the framing. Notice the peculiar phrase he uses: "time-absorbing factor." Not "entertainment medium." Not "information source." He understood, in 1936, that the fundamental product television would sell was the consumption of human attention. This is the language of the attention economy — a concept we typically credit to Herbert Simon in the 1970s or the Silicon Valley discourse of the 2010s.

Even more striking is the passage that precedes it. Von Ardenne opens his foreword by defending engineers against the charge that technology wastes human effort, and his defense is fascinatingly double-edged:

The technical worker is often reproached with the fact that he permits a high percentage of human effort to run to waste. To me, this reproach appears in the highest degree unjust, since, to give an up-to-date example, this same technical worker is also able to absorb the free time at his disposal by broadcast listening or by visits to the cinema.

Read that again carefully. His defense of technology against the charge of wasting human potential is that technology also fills up the free time it creates. He is describing, with perfect clarity, the treadmill that defines modern life: we build machines to save labor, then build other machines to consume the hours we saved. He saw the loop. He just didn't see it as a problem.

Von Ardenne himself was no ordinary hobbyist. He was a self-taught physicist who built one of the first electronic television systems, contributed to electron microscope development, and later worked on nuclear research for both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He lived until 1997 — long enough to see television fulfill his prediction and then begin its slow surrender to a new time-absorbing factor he never foresaw: the internet.

His book was a hands-on construction manual, meant to help experimenters build their own television receivers from cathode ray tubes in an era when you couldn't simply buy one. The fact that it opens with an almost philosophical meditation on technology and time suggests that even the most practical engineers of that era understood they were building something that would reshape daily life far beyond the workshop.