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In 1890, as the telephone’s influence spread across the United
States, Judge Robert S. Taylor of Fort Wayne, Ind., told an audience of
inventors that the telephone had introduced an “epoch of neighborship
without propinquity.”
Scientific American called it “nothing less than a new organization of society.” The
New York Times
reported that two Providence men “were recently experimenting with a
telephone, the wire of which was stretched over the roofs of innumerable
buildings, and was estimated to be fully four miles in length”:
They relate that on the first evening of their telephonic dissipation,
they heard men and women singing songs and eloquent clergymen preaching
ponderous sermons, and that they detected several persons in the act of
practising (sic) on brass instruments. This sort of thing was repeated every
evening, while on Sunday morning a perfect deluge of partially
conglomerated sermons rolled in upon them. … The remarks of thousands of
midnight cats were borne to their listening ears; the confidential
conversations of hundreds of husbands and wives were whispered through
the treacherous telephone. … The two astonished telephone experimenters
learned enough of the secrets of the leading families of Providence to
render it a hazardous matter for any resident of that city to hereafter
accept a nomination for any office.
In 1897 one London writer wrote,
“We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other.” (From Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 1988.)
