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.