The Information - James Gleick [91]
The initial phase of ignorance and skepticism passed in an eyeblink. The second phase of amusement and entertainment did not last much longer. Businesses quickly forgot their qualms about the device’s seriousness. Anyone could be a telephone prophet now—some of the same predictions had already been heard in regard to the telegraph—but the most prescient comments came from those who focused on the exponential power of interconnection. Scientific American assessed “The Future of the Telephone” as early as 1880 and emphasized the forming of “little clusters of telephonic communicants.” The larger the network and the more diverse its interests, the greater its potential would be.
What the telegraph accomplished in years the telephone has done in months. One year it was a scientific toy, with infinite possibilities of practical use; the next it was the basis of a system of communication the most rapidly expanding, intricate, and convenient that the world has known.… Soon it will be the rule and not the exception for business houses, indeed for the dwellings of well-to-do people as well, to be interlocked by means of telephone exchange, not merely in our cities, but in all outlying regions. The result can be nothing less than a new organization of society—a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications, of needless goings to and fro, of disappointments, delays, and a countless host of those great and little evils and annoyances.
The time is close at hand when the scattered members of civilized communities will be as closely united, so far as instant telephonic communication is concerned, as the various members of the body now are by the nervous system.♦
The scattered members using telephones numbered half a million by 1890; by 1914, 10 million. The telephone was already thought, correctly, to be responsible for rapid industrial progress. The case could hardly be overstated. The areas depending on “instantaneous communication across space”♦ were listed by the United States Commerce Department in 1907: “agriculture, mining, commerce, manufacturing, transportation, and, in fact, all the various branches of production and distribution of natural and artificial resources.” Not to mention “cobblers, cleaners of clothing, and even laundresses.” In other words, every cog in the engine of the economy. “Existence of telephone traffic is essentially an indication that time is being saved,” the department commented. It observed changes in the structure of life and society that would still seem new a century later: “The last few years have seen such an extension of telephone lines through the various summer-resort districts of the country that it has become practicable for business men to leave their offices for several days at a time, and yet keep in close touch with their offices.” In 1908 John J. Carty, who became the first head of the Bell Laboratories, offered an information-based analysis to show how the telephone had shaped the New York skyline—arguing that the telephone, as much as the elevator, had made skyscrapers possible.
It may sound ridiculous to say that Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture—of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger?