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Conversation Piece
A brief history of the telephone 
by Guy Babineau

Introduction / Invention and early history / Late 19th and early 20th century / Mid-20th century / The 1960s to today

From a dead man's ear and a cup of acid to space 
age headsets and cellular expansion, telephone 
design has come a long way. Portable, pocketable, 
digital communicators may free us up, but some of 
us have a soft spot for the old clunkers. Why? Let's 
talk.

Mark Twain was complaining about the telephone's 
intrusion into everyday life as far back as 1890, 
when he wrote, "It is my heart-warmed and world-
embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of 
us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, 
the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the 
savage (every man and brother of us all throughout 
the whole earth), may eventually be gathered 
together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace 
and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone."

Telephone design shaped the history of 20th century 
urban culture and contributed to the radical transformation
of work, family life and even the skyline of cities.

The invention of the telephone, like the personal 
computer, comprised several creators over a long 
period of time. Like the PC, its design lurched 
forward in fits and starts, mostly fits. Parallels to the 
PC are uncanny. The telephone emerged as a public 
force over the last three decades of a century that 
had seen unprecedented technological evolution. Its 
development and design were the result of patent 
disputes, plagiarized, reworked technology and 
antitrust allegations. The first telephones were 
awkward, hard to use and few could afford them. 
Finally, it wasn't the hardware that made the 
telephone a success but rather the mode of 
transmission and who controlled it. The software, in 
effect. War research resulted in the evolution of 
related technology that changed the shape of society 
and made the world smaller. Sound familiar?

In the 1970s, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter 
spent a day calling payphones at New York City's 
Grand Central Station and Kennedy Airport. Every 
time he dialed, someone answered, and when he 
asked them why they were surprised. Wasn't it 
obvious? "Because it rang," they unanimously 
replied.

Many of us couldn't imagine life without a 
telephone. We'd be suspect of someone who didn't 
have one, thinking them either antisocial or kooky. 
Yet more than half the people in the world have 
never used a telephone, let alone owned one. That's 
an appalling notion to those of us with call waiting, 
call display, call answer, call forwarding, pagers, 
mobiles and cells. When it sinks in, though, we 
might contemplate the tranquillity of a phoneless 
life. We might ask ourselves how and why we 
became so reliant on this little piece of plastic wired 
to the world? We might even become nostalgic.

Starting in the late 1800s, the phone's connectivity 
allowed rural and small-town families to break apart 
and still stay in touch when sons and daughters 
started a mass migration to large cities. 
Manufacturing plants and head offices could be in 
separate locations. Employees no longer needed to 
be side by side to discuss business, making it 
possible to stack people like pancakes in the new 
multistory, steel girder skyscrapers. Now the boss 
could call you at home. Gone forever was the clear 
delineation of home and the workplace. Telephones 
set a paradigm-more so than TV-that prepared us to 
assimilate personal computers into our lives. They 
were interactive. A telephone wasn't something 
people sat back and admired from a distance. It 
became an extension of the body, a part of us.

Today, cellphones are still status items, and users 
like to show them off. Maybe that's why, in public, 
people seem to talk twice as loudly on portable 
phones as they would in a normal conversation. 
When they're cheaper, easier to use and everyone 
has one, will the buses, subways, street corners and 
malls be filled with people blabbing at the tops of 
their lungs to someone not even there?

Despite concerns about the cellophane’s intrusion 
into our personal privacy, supporters are quick to 
point out that you can always turn them off. Yet 
Edward Carpenter's study indicated that we've 
already been conditioned not to, an example of 
telephone design's universal impact on human 
behavior.

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Originally published online at U magazine, now folded.

© Guy Babineau 2003-2004

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