Coming November 10
One hundred fifty years ago Alexander Graham Bell spoke the words “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you” into a contraption he called the telephone, and a voice was carried along a wire. It began a rolling revolution that has never ended.
This feat has long been celebrated as a triumph of individual ingenuity and vision. But its development was a contest replete with bribery and skulduggery. At first, no one, not even its inventors, realized what the telephone was good for.
It taught us new words ( “hello!”) and new ways of speaking, with instant reaction, instant feeling, instant possibilities. It created an all-female profession—the operator—that by 1920 outnumbered nurses and waitresses put together. It enabled the skyscraper, the world war, the assembly line, and the multinational corporation. And the Bell System would become the largest monopoly in history: the sole owner of every phone in America. The science that Bell Labs created around the telephone, from pulsing wires to glowing vacuum tubes to the electronic transistor, would usher in the Information Age.
Along the way, the telephone changed human nature. It augmented our bodies, a prosthetic extension of mouth and ear. It gave us the party line, the busy signal, dial tones, wiretapping, and the booty call. For a while, the revolution was so successful that it made telephones themselves seem natural, eternal. They settled into the background, on bedside tables, desks, and kitchen walls; in subways and on corners; in novels, movies, songs, and on TV. No one could remember life without them.
Today we are more dependent than ever on little objects called phones, although their ability to make “telephone calls” is incidental. The phone book and the phone booth may be vanishing from memory, but the telephone’s legacy is deeply ingrained—in our networks and our sophistication about networks, in the primacy of information, in the need for connection. The Telephone: A New History is a revelation: a story of technological breakthroughs that is also a universal history of intimate life.
Ultimately The Telephone is an answer to those philosophers who believe (with Octavio Paz) that “solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition.” Gleick argues otherwise. The telephone makes the globe a community; it connects the disconnected. “Connection is the profoundest fact of the human condition.”