Gleick draws a wealth of quirkiness and fun from the early history of the telephone. We learn that a year after the patent was granted, the United States got its first switchboard, a ramshackle thing run by a pharmacy in Hartford. Mark Twain, who lived nearby, installed a telephone line that he said was “the first telephone line ever used in a private home.” (Like many of his statements, this was nearly correct.) The next year, a mercantile exchange opened in New Haven, forty miles to the south. Six years later, the numbers have jumped: scientific american There are reportedly 906 switches and 123,625 US telephone subscribers. (Gleick and I were interested in the basic form of the telephone—conversation invisible from a distance—but bringing this story to the present reveals a world in which even Mama Bell and her core technology seem inconspicuous. Witness the ubiquity of the smartphone we spend our lives for.)
As the telephone became more common, it began to reshape the rules of society. It’s not initially clear how you should approach it. Even starting a phone call is worrisome. Then as now, when you met someone on the street, you might greet them with a handshake, a bow, or a kiss, along with some less obvious signals like keeping or closing the distance, and some introductory words like a formulaic greeting, or an off-the-cuff quip, or something you’d been dying to say for weeks. Phone calls disrupt these habits. It’s not just that you and your interlocutor can’t see each other; Because the earliest mobile phones were always “on”, your opening remarks must be careful. Bell preferred the nautical word “Ahoy,” sometimes “Ahoy-hoy,” presumably for the less alert and, in our day, the ancient Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. Edison was fond of “Hello,” also known as “Hallo” or “Hullo” or “Hulloa.” This is a coinage from the early 19th century, used to address people from far away. Through corporate encouragement and public acceptance, it quickly became the norm. Other prohibitions were ignored. When the New Haven Telephone Company was founded, users were encouraged to end calls by stating “That’s all.”
Phone calls can also upend the norms of civility. In 1905, the magazine Telephone Readers are cautioned not to “hastily communicate their violent thoughts to the girl who answered the phone.” Abuse of operators is clearly part of the epidemic of telephone behavior, Telephone Considered a “major moral issue” at the time. During the same period, a Michigan phone company offered gentle advice to customers—don’t hoover the line, don’t eavesdrop—but also warned of deeper dangers: “Some people use the phone to say things to others that they would not think to say face to face. It shows a cowardly spirit.” More than a century later, such behavior is still common. Viewed in this light, the phone is more of a potent narcotic than AT&T’s beacon of civilization.
It turns out that it is easier to control access to the phone than to control the voice that the phone conveys. Ms. Bell aggressively enforced her patents and granted her subsidiary, Western Electric Company, an exclusive license to manufacture telephone equipment. By the mid-1890s, Bell’s original patents were beginning to expire and independent phone companies were popping up, but AT&T.’s infrastructure had become so extensive that denying competitors access to its network would have shut it out of the market. The further the phone spread across the United States, the more obvious the problem became. Like the U.S. Post Office, which had been a formal monopoly since the late eighteenth century, Americans had few effective ways to move their business elsewhere and push for improvements to their telephone service. And, while Congress at least set postal rates, AT&T initially charged whatever it wanted. Bell leased the first telephone to customers in 1877, pricing it according to use: $20 per year for “social” use ($630 today) and double that for “business” use. By 1894, the average subscription cost in Manhattan was $240 (more than $9,000 today). Not signing up cost nothing and everything: “Every new telephone makes you more isolated,” one ad from the early 1900s warned reluctant readers.
Such signs suggested extortion, and onlookers were unimpressed. As early as 1886, era The Bell System had had enough: “From the beginning, it had robbed the people. It had built a business on fraudulent patents, through stock-filling, collusive lawsuits, secret alliances with other similar companies, unfair discrimination, and extortionate rates.” That year, about seven hundred customers in Rochester, New York, outraged by plans to raise rates, withheld their bills for eighteen months until the phone company backed down. Then again, maybe they were lucky to be blackmailed. Bell is again compared to the Post Office, which Congress ordered in 1916 to “provide services to the entire rural population of the United States to the greatest extent possible.” AT&T. has no such obligation. Theodore Vail, the company’s formidable founding president, spoke flippantly of “one system, one policy, universal service,” but what he meant by “universal” was the pursuit of monopoly—a state under Bell. In parts of the country, the cost of service is too high and AT&T is literally excluding people.
Some citizens have come up with clever solutions. Gleick told us about the “barbed wire telephone cooperatives” created by farmers on the prairie, who used steel fence wires as cables, connecting one wire to another, insulated with corncobs and leather straps. Multiple homes share a circuit, creating a “party line” where anyone can answer and join the call. During this period, the Industrial Workers of the World gained a foothold in American labor and engaged in sabotage in rural industry in pursuit of workers’ goals. Farmers’ phone moonshine had a similarly rebellious air. Why beg from Mama Bell when you can build a contraption yourself? These measures prevented farmers from having their pockets picked up in many ways: Gleicke points to a jolly Iowan who declared in 1905 that “chicken stealing has become a lost art” because of barbed wire.