Scholarly consensus has it that the first English novel was Robinson Crusoe, and the first English pornographic novel was Fanny Hill. The former (1719) is about a man on an island alone; the latter (1749) is about a woman in London with quite a bit of company. The time that elapsed between the invention of the novel and the invention of prose pornography was 30 years. Surveying the arms race in porn technology since then suggests a corollary to Moore's law: The time it takes for the first porn to emerge from a new medium is cut in half every 50 years. Consider that Louis Daguerre sold his photographic process to the French government in 1839, while the earliest surviving daguerreotype of a penis inside a vagina dates to 1846. (The penis had to stay very still.) The Lumière brothers unveiled their film patent, the Cinématographe, to Paris audiences in 1895, and a year later saw the grand debut of Le Coucher de la Mariée.
With the Internet era, we have entered a golden age of documentary coitus, in which an entire spectrum of not just erotic tastes but also levels of verisimilitude (from real amateur to fake "amateur" to full-on HD with professional lighting and a Tisch-trained dramaturge on set) is instantly available for free. The Internet also allows us to watch porn with our email open in a neighboring window, thus allowing us to gratify contemporary life's dual drives—orgasm and multitasking—at the exact same time. Most important from a historical perspective, though, is that we have reached the mathematical inflection point at which porn leads the development of new media, rather than the other way around. Now our state-of-the-art technologies begin with porn (e.g., Chatroulette, teledildonics) and only later do we reverse engineer them for non-pornographic use.
