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.