The Telephone’s Tangled History of Intimacy and Control
On May 25, 1943, millions of Americans sat down by the radio to hear a woman die. They didn’t yet know this, or not exactly. All they’d been told by CBS was that the evening’s episode of the drama series “Suspense” would revolve, unusually, around a single voice: that of the actress Agnes Moorehead. At 6:30 P.M. Pacific War Time, the broadcast began. Over suitably gothic chimes, the show’s host introduced “a new study in terror.” The episode’s writer was Lucille Fletcher, its running time was thirty minutes, and its title was “Sorry, Wrong Number.” Its atmosphere was somehow both frenzied and constrained. Mrs. Stevenson (Moorehead), a neurotic confined to bed, waits for her husband to come home. She tries to call his office, in New York—“Murray Hill 7-0093”—to urge him to hurry up, but, owing to some glitch, when the call connects she overhears two men planning a murder. In the course of another sixteen calls, she tries to get hold of her spouse, the police, and a local nurse, all to no avail. The lines seem constantly busy, and the operators incompetent. Mrs. Stevenson screams with rage—and then fear, because she gradually realizes, as you may have already, that she is the victim-to-be.
The victim is also you. One of the sinister appeals of “Sorry, Wrong Number”—which was praised by Orson Welles, a “Suspense” regular, as “the greatest single radio script ever written”—is that it makes us newly conscious of the menace lurking in an everyday technology: the telephone. For, as Mrs. Stevenson grows distressed, you become uncomfortably aware of her physical circumstance. Even as she casts her voice many miles away, she’s trapped. Her telephone’s wires have come to constitute the limits of her world. They’re also the limits of your world, you come to see, whenever you place a call yourself. What you know about the people on the other end of the line—their faces, their postures; whom they’re with, where they are, how truthful they’re being—can stretch only as far as what you’re told and what you choose to believe. Beyond that, you’re making inferences in the dark.
This may strike you as a little paranoid. The rise of the telephone, in the past century and a half—from the rotary diallers at home and the boxes in the street to the smartphones in every pocket—is associated with a change that, broadly speaking, we consider positive. The telephone gave us back what distance had always stolen: the intimacy of voice. Now your parent or your friend or your lover could be a thousand miles away yet softly in your ear. Such was the promise made to America by A.T. & T., a.k.a Ma Bell, the behemoth that, from the turn of the twentieth century to the nineteen-eighties, ran most of the phone industry. Telephones, it declared, were a milestone for us all. One of the company’s advertisements, from 1909, called them tools of “civilization . . . one of the most powerful influences for broadening human intelligence.” By the time of my own childhood, in Britain, a century later, the upbeat mantras hadn’t changed. Nokia: “Connecting People.” T-Mobile: “Life’s for Sharing.” We surely want connection, and we surely want to share. In “The Telephone: A New History” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), James Gleick begins in agreement, describing his subject as “an ordinary necessity” that has been “essential in the development of modern life.” It would be churlish to say that he’s wrong, or that the big carriers didn’t deliver on part of what they sold. Today, I live in London, a city where I have no family, but, at the touch of a screen, I can talk to loved ones far and wide.
Yet that partial intimacy can be unsettling. The telephone seems to abolish distance, but the voice remains fundamentally physical, air percussed by flesh. The telephone is a conjurer: hearing someone speak, we imagine that person with us in the room. Deprived of body language, unable to gauge the person’s tone against the way they touch their cheek or tilt their head, we invent what we cannot see, and may find ourselves wondering how much of our interlocutor is our own creation. The connection itself isn’t entirely under our control. The system we have to use, those wires pulsing with current—or, today, the cell towers humming with signals—belongs to other parties, faceless corporations, themselves possibly under bigger thumbs. It can be hard to forget that, when we route our words through those matrices, there may be someone else listening: since their inception, the wires have been tapped by operators, by eavesdroppers, by what Gleick calls a range of “invisible interlopers.” So we talk blindly into the receiver, and we’re never quite sure of where or how our words will land. “Sorry, Wrong Number” shows the telephone in one of its less examined aspects, as a paranoia machine; but then, as Mrs. Stevenson learned too late, some paranoias are justified.
Alexander Graham Bell came, as it were, at the end of a line. His grandfather, Alexander Bell, born in Scotland in 1790, had started off as an actor, then moved into teaching elocution. He worked on stammers and other speech impediments, first in his home town, St. Andrews, then in the great metropole of London. His son, Alexander Melville Bell, born in 1819, went into the same profession, made a great success of it, and wrote popular manuals, including “The Science of Speech” and “Bell’s Standard Elocutionist.” By the late nineteenth century, the name Bell and the practice of elocution—the professional enhancement of the voice—had become close to synonymous. (Decades later, Melville Bell would be one of George Bernard Shaw’s inspirations for Henry Higgins, the phonetics professor in “Pygmalion”; Higgins transcribes Eliza’s pre-tutored voice in Melville’s notation system, Bell’s Visible Speech.)
Alexander, or Aleck, son of Alexander Melville, was born in Edinburgh in 1847. After his brothers died young, of tuberculosis, the family quit Britain for Canada, hoping to save their remaining boy. They did, and though Alexander, who added the “Graham” on his eleventh birthday, was rarely in great health, he lived to seventy-five—well beyond the average Victorian. In 1871, he moved to Boston to teach at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, and soon, at the age of twenty-six, he became a professor at the newly founded School of Oratory. Already fascinated by human voices and other physical phenomena, he examined devices that played with waveforms, vibrations, and sounds. He toyed, in turn, with inventions of his own. In search of help, he visited a local electrical workshop, where he met Thomas Watson, another bright young thing. The two hit it off and began tinkering together above the shop.
In due course, with Watson’s aid, Bell invented the telephone, or so many a schoolchild could tell you. It’s true that, on March 7, 1876, he received a U.S. patent that declared it so, giving him the exclusive right to manufacture and sell the telephone, and assuring the Bell System’s rise to preëminence. But, as Gleick reminds us, inventions rarely emerge from a single mind. By 1860, for instance, the German physicist Johann Philipp Reis had invented what he named the Telephon, two devices linked by an electrified wire. Sixteen years later, on the same day that Bell filed for a patent, the electrical engineer Elisha Gray filed paperwork with the patent office as well. Thomas Edison wasn’t far behind, either; and so the queue went on. After the various claims were brought to a head before the Supreme Court, in a struggle so vicious that it may have caused the Chief Justice’s premature death, the Court in 1888 upheld Patent 174,465—and that was that. Bell had invented the telephone, and off it went, expanding in skeins across the land.
Gleick has a rich supply of oddities and delights from the telephone’s early history. Just a year after the patent was granted, we learn, America gained its first switchboard, a rickety thing run from a Hartford drugstore. Mark Twain, living nearby, installed a telephone line that he said was “the first one that was ever used in a private house.” (Like many of his claims, this was almost true.) The following year, a commercial exchange opened in New Haven, forty miles south. Six years later, the figures had leaped: Scientific American reported nine hundred and six exchanges and 123,625 American telephone subscribers. (Gleick’s interest, and mine, lies in the telephone’s essential form—sightless conversation at a distance—but carrying the story to the present reveals a world where even Ma Bell and her core technology look modest. Witness the ubiquity of the smartphones on which we so expensively spend our lives.)
As the telephone proliferated, it began to remake the social rules. It wasn’t clear, initially, how you ought to behave on it. Even beginning a call was fraught. Then as now, when you met someone in the street, you might greet them with a handshake, a bow, or a kiss, along with some less demonstrative signalling, such as a distance kept or closed, and a few introductory words, such as a formulaic greeting, or an offhand quip, or the thing you’d been longing to say for weeks. The telephone scrambled these habits. It wasn’t just that you and your interlocutor couldn’t see each other; because the earliest phones were always “on,” your opening words had to grab attention. Bell preferred the nautical word “Ahoy,” which was sometimes “Ahoy-hoy,” presumably for the less alert, and, in our own time, for the ancient Mr. Burns of “The Simpsons.” Edison liked “Hello,” also known as “Hallo” or “Hullo” or “Hulloa.” That was an early-nineteenth-century coinage, used for hailing a fellow from afar. Through a mixture of corporate encouragement and popular acceptance, it quickly became the norm. Other injunctions were ignored. The New Haven telephone company, in its early years, encouraged its users to end a conversation by declaring, “That is all.”
The telephone could also upend the norms of civility. In 1905, the magazine Telephony cautioned readers against the “hasty communication of tempestuous thoughts to the telephone girl.” Abusing the operator was apparently part of an epidemic of telephone behavior that Telephony deemed “the great ethical problem” of the day. During the same period, a Michigan telephone company offered subscribers bland advice—don’t hog the lines, don’t eavesdrop—but also warned that something deeper was at stake: “Some people take advantage of the telephone to say things to others they would not think of saying were they face to face with them. This shows a cowardly spirit.” More than a century later, such behavior remains familiar. In this light, the telephone seems less like A.T. & T.’s beacon of civilization than like a strong intoxicant.
Controlling access to the telephone proved easier than controlling the speech it conveyed. Ma Bell aggressively enforced her patents and granted her subsidiary, Western Electric, exclusive license to make telephone equipment. By the mid-eighteen-nineties, Bell’s original patents began expiring, allowing independent telephone companies to spring up, but A.T. & T.’s infrastructure was already so widespread that denying competitors access to its network could freeze them out of the market. The farther the telephone spread across America, the clearer the problem became. As with the U.S. Post Office, a formal monopoly since the late eighteenth century, Americans rarely had a meaningful way to take their business elsewhere and so push to improve their telephone service. And, though Congress at least set postal rates, A.T. & T. initially charged whatever it liked. Bell’s first telephone sets, which he rented out to users in 1877, were priced according to purpose: twenty dollars a year (six hundred and thirty dollars today) for “social” use and twice that for “business.” By 1894, the average subscription in Manhattan cost two hundred and forty dollars (more than nine thousand dollars today). Not signing up cost both nothing and everything: an advertisement in the early nineteen-hundreds warned reluctant readers that “every new telephone makes you the more isolated.”
Such slogans hinted at extortion, and onlookers were unimpressed. As early as 1886, the Times had had enough of the Bell System: “From the beginning it has plundered the people. A fraudulent patent at the foundation, and upon it a business built up by means of stock watering, collusive suits at law, secret alliances with other similar corporations, unjust discrimination and extortionate rates.” That year, some seven hundred subscribers in Rochester, New York, furious at plans to raise their charges, withheld their payments for eighteen months, until the phone company backed down. Then again, perhaps they were lucky to be extorted. Compare Bell, once more, with the Post Office, which was ordered by Congress in 1916 to serve “as nearly as practicable, the entire rural population of the United States.” A.T. & T. was under no such obligation. Theodore Vail, the company’s formidable founding president, spoke airily of “one system, one policy, universal service,” but all he meant by “universal” was the pursuit of monopoly—one nation under Bell. In parts of that nation where service provision would be too costly, A.T. & T. left people literally out of the loop.
Some citizens came up with clever work-arounds. Gleick tells us about the “barbed-wire telephone cooperatives” created by farmers on the prairies, who used steel fence wires as cables, one connecting to the next, insulated by corncobs and leather straps. Multiple households shared a circuit, resulting in “party lines,” on which anyone could pick up and join the call. This was a time when the Industrial Workers of the World had a serious foothold in U.S. labor and when sabotage, in the pursuit of workers’ aims, was practiced in rural industries; the farmers’ telephonic moonshine had a similar air of rebellion. Why go begging to Ma Bell when you could rig a contraption of your own? And these measures kept farmers from having their pockets picked in more ways than one: Gleick mentions a cheerful Iowan who, in 1905, declared that, thanks to the barbed-wire lines, “chicken stealing has become a lost art.”
Still, such scattered acts of resistance, however ingenious, could do little to curb the company’s power. For that, the government had to act. With antitrust law raising the spectre of regulation, Vail eventually accepted the need to change his tack. He did so with aplomb, cutting a deal, in 1913, with the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Bell would let smaller companies connect to its long-distance lines and cede control of Western Union, an old rival in which it had bought a controlling stake. In return, Ma Bell would continue to reign.
Leviathan, we might recall, was Hobbes’s metaphor for the state. It mediated relations between little guys who’d otherwise hack one another to bits. Such was the authority we deserved. It might also serve as a metaphor for the telephone, not just because the Bell System long enjoyed a stunning monopoly—Gleick brands it “the greatest commercial enterprise the world had ever known”—but because this technology has always involved a third party controlling our two-party links. Originally, this control was open and obvious. Your leviathan was one human and a set of cords. You spoke into your transmitter to an operator at the nearest exchange, gave the number of your desired address, and waited as she plugged and unplugged switchboard jacks, completed circuits, and connected your call. Even after your loved one picked up, the voice of that operator lingered in your ears, as if she were still on the line—which, quite possibly, she was. Reading Gleick’s account of early switching, I came to think that a nineteenth-century time traveller might find nothing unusual about Cold War bugging or N.S.A. wiretapping. The telephone network was never private. Call no line secure until it’s dead.
In Hartford and New Haven, the first operators were teen-age boys. As the network expanded, though, the jobs shifted to young women, who became known as Hello Girls. Marcel Proust would rechristen them “Guardian Angels . . . Danaids of the Unseen,” which has more panache. But, as the number of customers soared, manual switching came under strain. By 1910, the New York City area had fifty-two exchanges handling calls to and from three hundred and seventy-six thousand “stations” (likely a telephone or a private switchboard), and the numbers kept climbing. Connecting a call within one exchange took twenty-two seconds, longer for transfers, and, where technology is concerned, impatience springs eternal. How many Danaids of the Unseen could A.T. & T. hope to hire? Still, the company was slow to embrace automatic switching. Operators were cheap and reliable, and, for a long time, executives believed that asking customers to dial numbers themselves was a step backward. Using the telephone was supposed to be effortless.
For all its growing pains, the Bell System had become an emblem of American progress. Presidents Wilson and Vail reunited in 1915 to join the first official coast-to-coast telephone call. Bell and Watson, now in their sixties, took their places in New York and San Francisco, respectively, where they reënacted their first exchange, in 1876, with a jokey twist: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you”; “It would take me a week to get to you this time.” Then Wilson joined the line from the White House, with Vail listening, too, from his Georgia estate. (Gleick writes that Vail had “a silent guest, J. P. Morgan, at his side,” completing the picture of smoky-back-room power, though he means J. P. Morgan, Jr.—the old man had been dead nearly two years—and he could have added that William Rockefeller, Jr., was there as well.) The First World War did cause the telephone industry to be nationalized for a year, but this didn’t make much difference for users, notwithstanding a decree in Indiana that banned speaking German on the phone. (It’s another reminder that no one has ever talked with pure freedom on the telephone: the lines are subject to higher powers.) In April, 1920, Vail died, at the age of seventy-four. For one minute during his funeral, as a mark of respect, all Bell telephone service across America stopped.
The Bell System’s growth did not. Automatic switching finally began to spread, first through local exchanges. Rotary phones let users enter numbers themselves, and, at least in American cities, the ability to make local calls by dialling had become commonplace by the nineteen-thirties. Dials also linked numbers to letters, an association that entire nations took to heart. The letters preserved the old exchange names: to call someone on London’s Maida Vale exchange, for instance, you started by dialling 624, corresponding to M-A-I. Gleick mentions Hitchcock’s 1954 film “Dial M for Murder” and its use of a telephone as death’s handmaiden—a cheating housewife is phoned by her husband, who has hired an assassin to hide behind a curtain by the phone—but, when I rewatched the movie recently, I noticed something else. The opening credits show a closeup of a phone and superimpose an “M” on the relevant “MNO” finger hole without showing which number it replaces. A nineteen-fifties viewer would have found this unremarkable, but younger viewers today have no reason to know why “6” equates to “M.”
Long-distance calls placed without human assistance started to emerge in mid-century. In 1947, A.T. & T. established a numbering plan with three digits for the area and seven for you. Four years later, customers in Englewood, New Jersey, became the first to dial calls across the country themselves. By the time Hitchcock made his movie, automation had put many of the Danaids of the Unseen out of work, though lots of Americans still waited for “Number, please” well into the nineteen-sixties. Over the following decades, the requests and delays while jacks were fiddled gradually receded. Yet Leviathan endured. By 1960, the country had around forty million telephones, carrying countless American conversations through Ma Bell’s wires. When the system was broken up, in 1984, it had a hundred and fifty billion dollars in assets, nearly a million employees, and, it’s said, enough wire to circle the planet forty-six thousand times.
The telephone rearranged social life wherever it spread. If some of those earlier habits seem wonderfully dated now, we might bear in mind that habits often do in retrospect, and ours are likely to go the same way. I think of the nineteen-nineties BBC sitcom “Keeping Up Appearances,” in which Hyacinth Bucket, a middle-class woman with delusions of upward mobility—she pronounces her surname “Bouquet”—boasts of owning a “white slim-line telephone with last-number redial.” She begins a call to her rebellious sister with a warning: “I hope you’re wearing something sensible. . . . It always makes me very nervous to think I might be talking to a miniskirt.” Part of these jokes was on Hyacinth; the rest was on the watching nation, still steeped in etiquette—a mutual surveillance system with its own unspoken force. The telephone merely gave that system new moments in which to exert its power.
Little has changed on that front. Think how odd it feels to end a call without saying “goodbye,” yet what need is there to wish that your friends walk with God? (I’ve always liked that Leigh Bowery could end phone calls with “Bored now, bye!”) Technology works on our conventions and behaviors, probing their weak spots, threatening to make them, and us, ridiculous. Yet we become entangled with new inventions—in one sense, unable to live without them; in another, unable to live with them. Whenever you speak to someone, you’re both engaged in a performance, making characters of yourselves, perhaps even a spectacle. The telephone complicates this. It may carry voices, but it makes the absence of their bodies more acute.
A magnificent movie that I wish Gleick had mentioned turns on just this truth: “Locke,” a 2014 one-hander of sorts, follows a construction manager, played by Tom Hardy, driving his S.U.V. toward London while making, and taking, a series of painful calls. He tells his wife that a one-night stand with another woman has resulted in a pregnancy; he speaks with his sons, who are waiting for him to come home and watch a soccer match; and, because a huge concrete pour is scheduled for the next morning, he tries to manage the project remotely, talking to his boss, his underling, and others. Eventually, he speaks with the woman from that one-night stand, who’s in the hospital about to give birth to their child. He laughs, pleads, bangs the wheel; like Mrs. Stevenson, he’s pinned in place.
One more return to Gleick’s history, and to my favorite of his many arresting facts: Clarence Hickman, an inventor who helped develop the bazooka, also built an early answering machine. The juxtaposition may seem merely cute, but to me, well, it rings too true. Answering machines let you speak to someone who may never answer back. They invite you to talk into silence, to wait and listen. They can devastate you without warning. Reading about Hickman’s prototype, I thought of Jesse Pinkman, in “Breaking Bad.” After his girlfriend dies from an overdose, he lies awake and alone, calling her number again and again, just to hear her voice-mail greeting. Then, one night, the phone company disconnects her line, and, like Eurydice, she’s gone.
I thought, too, as Gleick does, of the narrator in Proust’s “Recherche,” who, after his grandmother places a call to him from Paris, realizes that he has never properly listened to her voice: “It was sweet, but also how sad it was . . . fragile by reason of its delicacy it seemed at every moment ready to break, to expire in a pure flow of tears . . . without the mask of her face, I noticed for the first time the sorrows that had scarred it in the course of a lifetime.” He can never see her quite the same way again. And I thought of my own grandmother, who died in 2008. I still remember her eleven-digit telephone number, the pattern that my fingers made on the buttons of my childhood Nokia. I think I remember her voice, too. But it’s been nearly two decades, and I’m not sure I do anymore. ♦