The telephone is a device for conducting spoken conversations across any distance beyond the range of the unaided human ear or the unamplified human voice. It works by transferring the atmospheric vibrations of human speech into a solid body, and by converting those vibrations into electrical impulses sent through a conducting medium—originally metal wires, but now optical fibers and electromagnetic microwaves as well. The word is a compound of two Greek words, " tele " ("far") and " phone " ("sound"), and the instrument is the most widely-used of all telecommunications appliances, with hundreds of millions of telephones in use all over the world. On any givenbusiness day, approximately two billion calls are placed, just in the United States. The telephone is also the archetypal electronic "medium," in the sense of the word intended by Marshall McLuhan—an "extension of man"—but its social impact is grossly understudied in favor of the more readily observable "bully blow" of the television. Telephones are small and unobtrusive and their impact on our visible environment (except for the poles and wires) has not transformed our relationship to it.
Alexander Graham Bell with his invention, the telephone.
Notwithstanding a host of rival claimants, the traditional account of the telephone's invention by the Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) remains substantially the correct one. While the word "telephone" itself had been used to describe a device similar to a children's string telephone as long ago as the seventeenth century, and although the general concepts on which the invention was based had been known for several decades, it was certainly Bell who experienced the sudden flash of insight which he immediately translated into a working model.
Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson had been trying to develop not a telephone, but something Bell called a "harmonic telegraph," by which he hoped to expand the bottleneck throttling communications traffic and permit the transmission of more than one telegraph message over a single wire at the same time. Bell's ideas involved a series of vibrating metal reeds (like those used in wind instruments). Of course, once he had developed that technology, his goal was, in fact, to discover a way to transmit all the sounds of the human voice via his "harmonic telegraph." On June 2, 1875, Bell and Watson were working at opposite ends of a line and Bell heard the distinct sound of a plucked reed coming through the line. He ran to the next room and shouted to his assistant, "Watson! What did you do then? Don't change anything!" From that moment, it took only an hour or so more of plucking the reeds and listening to the sounds they made before Bell was able to give Watson instructions on making the first "Bell telephone," which was capable of transmitting only the sounds of the human voice, not words. Bell and Watson worked through the summer of 1875, and in September, Bell began to write the specifications for his basic patent, which was issued on March 7, 1876 (#174,465). It is, to date, the most valuable patent ever issued. (The famous "Mr. Watson, come here! I want you!" was spoken after the first patent was issued, when Bell and Watson were working on perfecting their transmitter.) Ultimately victorious, Bell had to defend his patent in over 600 separate lawsuits.
The Bell Telephone Company, first of its kind, was founded on July 9, 1877. That same July, Bell married Mabel Hubbard and sailed to England to introduce his telephone there. Well before 1900, Thomas Watson, Thomas Edison, Emil Berliner, and others had worked with Bell's patented technology to produce what would be recognized as a telephone in the late 1990s. The telephone has consisted of the same basic components: a power source, switch hook, dialer, ringer, transmitter, and receiver.
The social impact of the telephone has been literally incalculable. Although the telegraph, patented by the painter Samuel B. Morse in 1840, enjoys pride of place as the first electric instrument to extend and greatly speed human communication, it never became a ubiquitous home appliance like the telephone—it was too complicated to use, and required too much special knowledge (codes, key technique). All a person needs to know in order to use a telephone is how to talk and to listen; it is not necessary to be literate or to have more than a minimal mechanical aptitude. It is, moreover, next to impossible to gossip using a telegraph. Like a religion, telegraphy has its privileged class, the operators, and gossip passes most freely between equals, without going through an intermediary. Because the telephone enables two people to exchange gossip directly, though they may be on opposite sides of the Earth, the telephone has, more than any other invention, produced what Marshall McLuhan called "the global village."
The telephone has changed war and business and the whole gamut of public activities, as well, but it has not transformed them out of recognition, the way it has altered the fundamental relationship of one individual to another and of one individual to society. Warfare is altered by the invention of a new weapon, from the metal sword to the atomic bomb; business is altered by intellectual inventions like double entry book-keeping or speculation or advertising or market capitalism. Public life has changed with the emergence of new institutions—the law, the "Republic," democracy, dictatorship—and is now being replaced by the television camera.
But the telephone began the seismic shift in sensibility described by Martin Pawley in his book The Private Future : "Western societies are collapsing not from an assault on their most cherished values, but from a voluntary, almost enthusiastic abandonment of them by people who are learning to lead private lives of an unprecedented completeness with the aid of the momentum of a technology which is evolving more and more into a pattern of socially atomizing appliances." The telephone, which has been traditionally promoted as a means of bringing people together, of connecting them, is in fact the archetype of Pawley's "socially atomizing appliance." The filmmaker Bill Forsyth gives a perfect example of this in his film, Local Hero. The character played by Peter Riegert wants to invite to dinner a girl standing less than 20 feet away from him on the other side of a glass partition—so he dials her extension. That is "the Private Future" in action.
Cordless phones, answering machines, cellular phones, "call waiting," phones in automobiles, headset phones which free up both hands—all these seem likely to increase our dissociation from the here and now, and to hasten our withdrawal from the public sphere into "private lives of an unprecedented completeness." The dangers inherent in the disappearance of any meaningful public life should be obvious. On the most primitive level, consider the person driving a big shiny suburban wagon, about to negotiate a tricky left turn through a busy intersection while they chat on the telephone with a friend. This person has the illusion of being in two places at once—with the friend and in traffic—but is in fact nowhere at all. The friendship, however, is not in physical danger—the other vehicles approaching that intersection, along with their passengers, are in the gravest peril. By the end of the 1990s legislation restricting the use of telephones in automobiles in the United States began to pass in several states. The whole concept of interdependence, of civic responsibility, is losing its force. The huge juggernaut of communications technology which was launched when Alexander Graham Bell burst in on Thomas Watson and shouted "Don't change anything!" has changed everything. Whether for the better or the worse depends on the relative importance you ascribe to the social contract.
Further Reading:
Casson, Herbert Newton. The History of the Telephone. Chicago, A.C. McClurg, 1910.
Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart
Coe, Lewis. The Telephone and Its Several Inventors: A History. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland, 1995.
Fischer, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1992.
Harlow, Alvin F. Old Wires and New Waves: The History of the Telegraph, Telephone, and Wireless. New York, D. Appleton-Century, 1936.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Pawley, Martin. The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West. London, Thames and Hudson, 1973.
Prescott, George B. Bell's Electric Speaking Telephone: Its Invention, Construction, Application, Modification, and History. 1884. Reprint, New York, Arno Press, 1972.
Stehman, Jonas Warren. The Financial History of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1925.
Stern, Ellen, and Emily Gwathmey. Once Upon a Telephone: an Illustrated Social History. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1994.
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