Gleick has a rich source of oddities and delights from the telephone’s early history. We learn that just a year after the patent was granted, America had its first power plant; It’s a puny thing from a pharmacy in Hartford. Mark Twain, who lived nearby, established a telephone line that he said was “the first telephone used in a private home.” (Like many of his claims, this was almost true.) The next year, a commercial exchange opened in New Haven, forty miles to the south. Six years later the numbers have jumped: Scientific American reported nine hundred six exchanges and 123,625 American telephone subscribers. (Gleick’s and my interest lies in the phone’s basic form — conversation unseen from a distance — but moving the story to the present reveals a world where even Ma Bell and her basic technology seem modest. Witness the ubiquity of smartphones on which we spend our lives dearly.)
As the telephone became more widespread, social rules began to be reshaped. It wasn’t clear at first how you should go about this. Even starting a search was alarming. Then, as now, when you meet someone on the street, you might greet them with a handshake, a bow or a kiss, a less descriptive sign like keeping your distance or keeping your distance, and a few introductory words like a formulaic greeting, an offhand joke, or what you’ve been meaning to say for weeks. The phone has confused these habits. The problem wasn’t just that you and your interlocutor couldn’t see each other; Because early phones were always “on call,” your opening words had to stand out. Bell preferred the nautical word “Ahoy”; the word sometimes meant “Ahoy-hoy,” presumably for the less alert and nowadays the former Mr. Burns of “The Simpsons.” Edison liked “Hello,” also known as “Hello,” “Hello,” or “Hello.” This was an early nineteenth-century coin used to greet a friend from afar. Thanks to a mix of institutional encouragement and popular acceptance, it quickly became the norm. Other orders were ignored. In its early years, the New Haven telephone company encouraged its users to end a conversation by saying, “That’s all.”
The telephone can also subvert norms of politeness. magazine in 1905 Telephone he warned readers against “hasty transmission of stormy thoughts to the girl on the phone.” Being abusive to the carrier was apparently part of the telephone behavior epidemic. Telephone It is seen as the “biggest ethical problem” of the age. Around the same time, a phone company in Michigan offered mild advice to its subscribers—don’t jam the lines, don’t eavesdrop—but also warned that something deeper was at stake: “Some people take advantage of the telephone to tell others things they wouldn’t think to say face to face. This is the sign of a cowardly spirit.” More than a century later, such behavior still feels familiar. Seen this way, the phone looks more like a powerful intoxicant than AT&T.’s beacon of civilization.
It turns out that controlling access to the phone is easier than controlling the conversation it transmits. Ma Bell aggressively enforced his patents and granted exclusive license to his subsidiary Western Electric to manufacture telephone equipment. By the mid-1890s, Bell’s original patents began to expire, allowing independent telephone companies to emerge, but AT&T.’s infrastructure was so widespread that denying competitors access to its network could lock them out of the market. As the phone spread across America, the problem became clearer. As with the U.S. Post Office, which had been a formal monopoly since the late eighteenth century, Americans rarely found a meaningful way to move their business elsewhere and improve telephone service. And although Congress at least set postal rates, AT&T. In the beginning, he was charging whatever he wanted. The first telephone sets that Bell rented to users in 1877 were priced according to their purpose: twenty dollars a year (six hundred and thirty dollars today) for “social” use, twice that for “business” use. By 1894 the average subscription in Manhattan cost two hundred and forty dollars (more than nine thousand dollars today). It costs nothing and everything to not sign up: An ad from the early 1900s warned reluctant readers that “every new telephone makes you lonelier.”
Such slogans amounted to extortion and the audience was unimpressed. As early as 1886, Times He was fed up with the Bell System: “It preyed on the public from the beginning. A false patent in the foundation and a business was built on top of it through stock dilution, secret litigation in law, secret alliances with similar companies, unfair discrimination, and exorbitant rates.” That year, nearly seven hundred subscribers in Rochester, New York, angry at plans to raise their rates, withheld their payments for eighteen months until the telephone company backed down. Maybe they were lucky to be usurped. Compare Bell, once again, to the Post Office, which was ordered by Congress in 1916 to serve “as much as possible the entire rural population of the United States.” AT&T. had no such obligation. Theodore Vail, the company’s formidable founding chairman, talked airily of “one system, one policy, universal service,” but by “universal” all he meant was the pursuit of monopoly—one nation under Bell. AT&T. has literally left people out of the loop in some parts of this country where it would be too costly to provide service.
Some citizens found clever solutions. Gleick tells us about “barbed wire telephone cooperatives” formed by farmers on the prairies who used interconnected steel fence wires as cables, insulated with corncobs and leather straps. Multiple households sharing a circuit resulted in “party lines” where anyone could pick up the call and join. This was a period when the Industrial Workers of the World gained a significant foothold in US labor and when rural industries were being sabotaged for workers’ purposes; The farmers’ moonshine on the phone had a similar air of rebellion. Why try to beg Ma Bell when you can build your own contraption? And these precautions prevented farmers’ pockets from being ripped off in more ways than one: Gleick cites a cheerful Iowan who declared in 1905 that, thanks to barbed wire, “chicken theft has become a lost art.”