More Resistance to the Telephone

In my previous post, I mentioned that the engineers at Western Union had dismissed the idea that someday there would be a phone in every home as being impossible since the combinatorics of switching would require everyone in the country to become a telephone operator. But, this engineering analysis was not the only resistance to this new invention. There were social barriers to overcome as well. 

One of these issues was the result of the fact that people simply did not understand how the telephone worked. From the perspective of most people, the telephone produced a disembodied voice from a person who was many miles away. How did that work? It appeared to employ an occult force. An occult force is merely a force for which you don’t understand the mechanisms by which it occurs. So, for most people, the disembodied voice was produced by an occult force. Once you are into occult forces, all kinds of other things are possible. If you can talk to somebody many miles away, can you also talk to dead people or people in the future? Today, since we understand how this all works, these questions seem silly. But to people who don’t quite understand, these things these are distinct  possibilities.

Another problem created by the telephone was how to greet people who were calling. At the time there were social conventions dictating how people greeted each other based on their relative social classes. But, when somebody calls you on the telephone, you have no idea who is calling and hence you do not know their social class. How do you answer? Eventually, this problem was solved by introducing a new work into the language. We still use this term today. When the telephone rings, we pick it up and say “Hello”. But, at the time, this was a major concern.

To add to the problems the telephone was having gaining acceptance was the problem that most telephone operators were young unmarried women. As operators, these young unmarried women were talking to men to whom they had not been properly introduced. This was considered by some to be the depths of depravity and their lack of moral standing led to the derisive title – call girl.

The point here is that that when new technologies face resistance due to social or economic pressures we cannot assume that those pressures will be enough to prevent its acceptance. Many times, new technologies just run roughshod over these barriers and gain acceptance in spite of them.

Well, enough about the telephone and its struggles for acceptance.  Next time I will turn to an emerging technology – the holographic image – and see if we can apply anything we have learned to that.

Will the Telephone Catch On?

Following in the vein of the previous post which asked “Will Cell Phones Catch On?”, I will take on an even older question and ask “Will the Telephone Catch On?” As hard as it may be to believe that there was a time when people were skeptical about the prospects of cell phones catching on, it is even more difficult to believe that there was a time when people were very skeptical about the prospects of the telephone catching on.

In the famous battle between Alexander Graham Bell and Western Union over the rights to telephone patent, the court decided to grant patent rights for the telephone to Bell. Western Union agreed to stay out of the telephone business and Bell agreed to stay away from the telegraph business. In hindsight, it is astonishing that Western Union would have accepted such an imbalanced judgment.  But, at the time, it did not seem so short sighted.

Why didn’t a company as wealthy as Western Union just fight the case in court until Bell ran out of money? Well, as it turns out, an internal memo from the engineering staff at Western Union cautioned the company against wasting good money on Bell’s folly. In a respectable analysis, the engineers said that Bell’s claim that there would someday be a phone in every home was preposterous on the face of it.  The problem they cited was in the combinatorics of switching.  Avoiding the math and cutting to chase I can sum up their argument by saying that in order for there to be a phone in every home, the demand for switching would require every person in the country to become a telephone operator.  Hence, Bell’s vision was not plausible.

A point about predictions that I should inject at this point is that even if we wait for things to play out we may never be able to determine if a given prediction really did come true. In the case of the combinatorics of switching one might claim that it did not come true as automated switching and eventually computerized switching took over the job of the telephone operator. So, the prediction did not come true. On the other hand one might also claim that since we enter a number on our phones to set up the switched circuit, we have indeed, as the engineers at Western Union predicted, all become telephone operators.

But, it wasn’t just technical problems inhibiting the expansion of the telephone. There were social problems as well. And that we will turn to next time.