The Information - James Gleick [90]
One reason for these misguesses was just the usual failure of imagination in the face of a radically new technology. The telegraph lay in plain view, but its lessons did not extrapolate well to this new device. The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped out by a trained intermediary. To employ the telephone, one just talked. A child could use it. For that very reason it seemed like a toy. In fact, it seemed like a familiar toy, made from tin cylinders and string. The telephone left no permanent record. The Telephone had no future as a newspaper name. Business people thought it unserious. Where the telegraph dealt in facts and numbers, the telephone appealed to emotions.
The new Bell company had little trouble turning this into a selling point. Its promoters liked to quote Pliny, “The living voice is that which sways the soul,” and Thomas Middleton, “How sweetly sounds the voice of a good woman.” On the other hand, there was anxiety about the notion of capturing and reifying voices—the phonograph, too, had just arrived. As one commentator said, “No matter to what extent a man may close his doors and windows, and hermetically seal his key-holes and furnace-registers with towels and blankets, whatever he may say, either to himself or a companion, will be overheard.”♦ Voices, hitherto, had remained mostly private.
The new contraption had to be explained, and generally this began by comparison to telegraphy. There were a transmitter and receiver, and wires connected them, and something was carried along the wire in the form of electricity. In the case of the telephone, that thing was sound, simply converted from waves of pressure in the air to waves of electric current. One advantage was apparent: the telephone would surely be useful to musicians. Bell himself, traveling around the country as impresario for the new technology, encouraged this way of thinking, giving demonstrations in concert halls, where full orchestras and choruses played “America” and “Auld Lang Syne” into his gadgetry. He encouraged people to think of the telephone as a broadcasting device, to send music and sermons across long distances, bringing the concert hall and the church into the living room. Newspapers and commentators mostly went along. That is what comes of analyzing a technology in the abstract. As soon as people laid their hands on telephones, they worked out what to do. They talked.
In a lecture at Cambridge, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell offered a scientific description of the telephone conversation: “The speaker talks to the transmitter at one end of the line, and at the other end of the line the listener puts his ear to the receiver, and hears what the speaker said. The process in its two extreme states is so exactly similar to the old-fashioned method of speaking and hearing that no preparatory practice is required on the part of either operator.”♦ He, too, had noticed its ease of use.
So by 1880, four years after Bell conveyed the words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” and three years after the first pair of telephones rented for twenty dollars, more than sixty thousand telephones were in use in the United States. The first customers bought pairs of telephones for communication point