Ithiel de Sola Pool (szerk.), The Social Impact of the Telephone

Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977.

INVENTION AND "REVOLUTION"

There are certain rare moments in history when, through some remarkable human insight, discovery, creative work, or invention, human life and social institutions take a great leap. The invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire are sometimes quoted as such moments, but of their introduction and of life before them we know little. But the invention we are now celebrating - the telephone - is fully documented, as is the social history of the industrialized world before and after its introduction.

Inventions themselves are not revolutions; neither are they the cause of revolutions. Their powers for change lie in the hands of those who have the imagination and insight to see that the new invention has offered them new liberties of action, that old constraints have been removed, that their political will, or their sheer greed, are no longer frustrated, and that they can act in new ways. New social behavior patterns and new social institutions are created which in turn become the commonplace experience of future generations.

Such realization does not come easily, quickly, or even "naturally," for the new invention can first be seen by society only in terms of the liberties of action it currently possesses. We say society is "not ready," meaning that it is bound by its present customs and habits to think only in terms of its existing institutions. Realization of new liberties, and creation of new institutions means social change, new thought, and new feelings. The invention alters the society, and eventually is used in ways that were at first quite unthinkable.

The computer is a present-day example of this process; it was seen at first as a "robot," an "electronic brain" which could play chess and challenge human expertise (or could it?). The workaday uses for accountancy, industrial process control, airways bookings, and innumerable functions within business, industry and commerce, so familiar in today's world, came later. The computer, like the telephone, and other radical inventions are seen, at the very first, as "adult toys."

It would be hazardous today for anyone reared in an industrialized country to imagine what personal life was like before the telephone, or what feelings people had then. I do not refer merely to the domestic telephones (for many people in Britain and other industrial countries have no home telephones); rather, I mean life before the creation of hosts of social organizations in the economic and public spheres, which today utterly depend upon the telephone: business, industry, government, news services, transport systems, police. The list is endless, and today it embraces increasing numbers of international organizations.

These form our modern world; the telephone was invented within a very different world. We can try to imagine ourselves living in that world, but we shall be deceived. We may find amusing the uses to which the people of 1876 first applied their new toy, "the Speaking Telephone," but we cannot be one of those people.
 

ORGANIZATION: THE HALLMARK OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

The telephone (or, rather, telephone system or network) is no ordinary invention, not just another desirable consumer product. It handles "message traffic" and indeed, creates this traffic (the very stuff of which social intercourse is made) by its very existence. For this reason, its importance to industrial life is not just that it is another machine of production, like a spinning jenny or a steel rolling mill. Its importance is as a contribution to the organized bureaucracy that is the hallmark of modern industrial society. It was Max Weber, years ago, who argued that organized bureaucracy forms the essential characteristic of an industrial society; rather than capital or machinery, it is organization - above all, systematic recording and good accountancy - that makes industrialization possible. (After all, the early Chinese had both science and technology, centuries before Europe, but they did not develop industry.)

In the economic sphere, the telephone service is essentially organizational in function, it creates productive traffic.

It could be objected that other systems of rapid communication preceded the telephone. Were they not equally important? The telegraph?¹ The heliograph? Or even the Talking Drum (to which the telephone is blood brother)?² Of course, these were of great importance; yet the telephone system stands above all, and has been far more profound in its effects, for two essential reasons. First, the telephone system allows us to move about the country (or, today, over much of the world) and yet appear to stay in one place (thereby adding security to mobility). Second, it offers all the psychological values of the human voice.
 

THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE TELEPHONE EXCHANGE

Having so far engaged in what may seem to be hyperbole, I shall now do the opposite and indulge in apparent denigration, by arguing that the telephone itself, the talking instrument that stands upon your desk, would not have been very important by itself. It might have lived in posterity's mind alongside electric doorbells, ships' telegraphs, and Gramophones. Perhaps we ought not to celebrate the telephone at all, in 1976, but should wait a couple of years more and celebrate instead the telephone exchange. It was the exchange principle that led to the growth of endless new social organizations, because it offered choice of social contacts, on demand, even between strangers, without ceremony, introduction, or credentials, in ways totally new in history.

The exchange principle led rapidly to the creation of networks, covering whole countries and, since World War II, interconnecting the continents. Anybody, without special training, can move about the geographic areas covered by the network and yet appear to another person on the network to be stationary. (In Britain, we often say, when opening telephone conversation: "Hello, are you there?" Where is "there," pray? It really doesn't matter.) Whole new forms of social institution and organization eventually became possible, new forms that no longer required people to be located at a fixed point. Today we accept as natural that business people may travel without appearing to leave their offices; that industrial branches can be located in scattered places, yet remain as operative units; that diplomats may fly around the world (perhaps they might do better staying at home); that government departments no longer must be concentrated in the metropolis; that police whizz about in cars; that shoppers may stay at home or go elsewhere at choice. The field telephone did as much for army tactics as radio later did for naval warfare. Such freedom of movement was not at first understood, though the early telegraphs and railways had paved the way.

The telegraph, however, had not previously offered such liberty, for two basic reasons. First, it required expertise to operate. Second, since its "codes" required trained operators, public demand did not grow sufficiently to justify installation of public telegraph exchanges or the setting up of a public network. On the contrary, telephone exchanges rapidly came into public use.

The early telegraphs operating point-to-point enabled railways to run on planned schedules; they also connected stock exchanges (e.g., the London and Paris exchanges were connected in 1851). Telegraphs found institutional use rapidly, but even today they are not found in homes; for a very long time they were used without exchanges to serve pr-assigned functions (such as connecting railway signal boxes).

Telegraph exchanges eventually came into use, but for the reasons mentioned they served economic (institutional) usages, with trained operators, rather than private (domestic) needs.

Nevertheless, these telegraph exchanges provided a conceptual model when telephones sprang to public attention. They were rapidly introduced for use within the domestic and economic spheres; the telephone network, from its early days, served both.

The first public telephone exchange appeared at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878, followed by another of eight lines, in London in 1879. From that time, the telephone network grew rapidly and spread throughout Europe and across America, taking migrants and pioneers with it.
 

TELEPHONES: THE ECONOMIC AND THE DOMESTIC SPHERES OF USAGE

In the domestic sphere (homes) the telephone is a "consumer product"; the home has only a finite disposable income, and if money is spent on a telephone that same money cannot be spent on anything else. Certain home telephones serve economically productive functions; e.g., doctors or businessmen working from home. On the other hand, telephones in the economic sphere (e.g., business, industry) eventually come to serve economically productive functions, as organization is increasingly based upon telephone usage. This distinction between the domestic and economic spheres is frequently recognized by the application of different tariff systems by the telephone authorities.

When the telephone first appeared 100 years ago, its productive function was not understood. As Chapters 1 and 2 have explained, the telephone was first seen as a one-way "broadcast" service, anticipating radio broadcasting by some forty years. Once the two-way conversational function became clear, exchanges were introduced. This set the future of the telephone system as an organizing instrument, and it began to be adopted within the economic sphere. Then, as wealth steadily increased, it became increasingly used in homes.

This principle may be demonstrated today by statistical comparison of countries having different economic conditions. Figure 1 
shows the high correlation between (a) the ratio of telephones per 100 population in the domestic and economic spheres and (b) the Gross National Products of various countries in 1968.

It was the introduction of the telephone exchange principle and the growth of the network that finally converted Graham Bell's invention from a toy into a social instrument of immense organizational and economic power. The network served both the domestic and economic spheres of usage, in changing ratio, as time passed. (The same thing has been said of roads - that they serve the needs of both sport and transport.)

The telephone network called for something else that was new - some form of subscriber organization involving rights of usage and identification (i.e., a numbering plan). Telephone directories appeared, and in principle any of those people listed could reach any of the others as a right of "membership." "Privacy" was apparently threatened and new law was called for. We have become completely accustomed to the telephone today and tolerate the way it enables others to barge into our offices and homes, in voice and spirit, preceded only by the ritual ringing of a bell, whereas we would not permit such forced entry otherwise (say by climbing through a window).
 

THE TELEPHONE IN THE SOCIETY OF 1876

What did people think about the telephone when it was first exhibited and became known through popular articles and advertisements? We can gain some idea of their attitudes to the new wonder and of their imaginings with regard to its uses by reading some early accounts. An article³ reprinted from the 1877-1878 edition of the Journal of the Telegraph Electrical Society, of Melbourne, describes some Australian telephones and experiments of the day.

...

Not surprisingly, the telephone was first seen as a better bell-pull, whereby master could summon a servant, or as an improved speaking tube, through which orders could be sent.⁴ The conversational power of the telephone was revealed only later,⁵ when it bacame clear that the servant now had enhanced power for answering back or even for summoning the master; it became a major force for social leveling!

...

It is ... interesting to note that [some] experiments described in this article consist of singing hymns, and "God Save the Queen," and playing musical instruments. "What is the future of this wonderful discovery," it asks "now in its infancy, and not much more than a scientific toy ... it is impossible to forsee," and then suggests that it could be used for relaying hymns and sermons to a hundred people simultaneously. Even Bell himself (as Aronson has already told us) conceived of the early telephone first as contributing to entertainment, for its real social value as an organizing instrument did not become clear until the telephone exchange was imagined.
 

THE TELEPHONE NETWORK:
THE LARGEST AND MOST COMPLEX MACHINE IN THE WORLD

It is easy to be amused by such early visions, but we should not feel superior in our hindsight. As argued already, the future usages of any invention are almost impossible to predict, because the nature of the future society is totally unknown. In fact, Bell and his financial backers (who rapidly came forward) did have remarkable vision, which the invention of the manual telephone exchange clarified. The enormous potential for creation of new social relationships and organizations was envisaged very early.

As the number of lines to a manual exchange increased, so the number of possible interconnections between pairs of subscribers increased combinatorially; that is, as the number of subscribers increased linearly, so the size and complexity of the exchange needed to increase binomially. (See Chapter 15.) Eventually there came a limit to the practical size of an exchange, beyond which manual operators could no longer cope. Trunk exchanges and local exchanges developed to spread the load, but the steady growth of subscribers gradually revealed an increasing problem. In 1889 Almon Strowger (an American undertaker), annoyed by his apparently inefficient operator, designed his automatic selector switch. The first automatic exchange was opened in LaPorte, Indiana, in 1892; the Strowger selector was adopted subsequently throughout the world, until 1926 when the crossbar switch was first introduced in Sweden.

Few members of the public have the slightest idea of the complexity and scale of modern national telephone networks when they are critical of lost calls or wrong numbers. The network is a technological miracle; its global reach, scale, and capital value are staggering. The telephone network now interconnecting the continents is by far the largest integrated machine in the world.
 

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE TELEPHONE

I should like to turn next to my second reason for claiming that the telephone service has had a much more profound social effect than other technical modes of communication; namely, because of its psychological values.

The telephone continues the verbal tradition because it operates with the human voice and requires no special codes, training, or skills as did the telegraph. Phoning is as easy and natural as talking. For such reasons, it has great value for developing countries where literacy may be low and the verbal tradition dominant. Radio has similar value for the same reason; indeed President Nasser of Egypt once remarked, "Radio now counts for more than literacy."

The psychological importance of human speech is not always appreciated, at least by people of normal hearing. Every time we hold a conversation we relate to another person, not to a thing; their replies to our remarks reinforce the sense of our existence. We are challenged and valued - our partner is a mirror in which we see our own images. We exist as persons, through society.

The telephone operates as an extension of nature in this way. We have today become so accustomed to the telephone that it rarely strikes us as odd that when we want advice, consolation, or information we walk toward this little black thing on the table, talk to it, and listen to what it says. Our trust is really extraordinary. We consult the telephone, much in the same way that an Ancient Greek would have consulted the Oracle. If we want to know the time we dial TIME and believe what the golden voice tells us - we trust it more than we trust our own watches!

I should like to end by saying a little more about the social values of the telephone. With it, I shall link radio (for that, too, uses Graham Bell's inventions, the microphone and earpiece as they were in his day, or derivatives of these).
 

ON THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TELEPHONE SERVICE

Emile Durkheim, the great sociologist, once asked the question: How can it be that we feel more free, as the powers of the State have grown? He answered that it is only when the numerous state institutions are efficient and clearly defined that we know what is expected of us and what constraints bear upon us. Law may constrain us; yet only if it is clearly defined do we know where we stand and how we may act. Anarchy is not liberty, but slavery. It is very much through the extensive network of communication in industrial countries, reaching from the metropolis into every town, village, home, and back again, that we can operate in ways that enable us to feel "free" as individuals, though knowing that we are socially constrained. Liberty rests not only on a foundation of defined authority but also upon the operation of a two-way communication service.

If a country or a scattered empire does not possess an adequate communication service, how can it be held together? How can its various scattered institutions of local government operate in concert? How can a centralized authority know what is happening in outlying regions? It can only be done by the creation of a strong ideological system, some rigid system of education through which local governors are trained into intense loyalty to principles, so that when they are sent out to govern, their behavior will be predictable.

The public schools of nineteenth-century Britain ideologically trained those going out to govern scattered regions. The telegraph eventually made a difference! The Roman Empire covered a vast area in its day, yet it had only the slenderest lines of communication. Caesar could send orders or receive advice from the Governor of Londinium only through a postal service, using horses and caravans. There were relay stations every forty miles where horses could be changed, but the trip took about a month and a lot could happen in that time to render those messages obsolete.⁶Caesar needed a telephone service! Long delay of messages is likely to make social organization more unstable bicause counteraction may become outdated by the turn of events.

A further social consequence follows from the introduction of a telephone service. Because a network offers choice of contact between subscribers over larger geographic areas, these contacts are likely increasingly to be between strangers. In tribal society the social institutions are local and formed of kinsmen or close personal associates, but those of industrial societies force us to associate with abstracts whom we call "managers" "representatives," or "officers," people not necessarily known to us as persons. This means that new forms of trust have to be developed; not trust in kinsmen but trust in abstract "representatives" whom we have never met. It is a major psychological change.⁷

A highly developed, two-way communication service is an essential pre-requisite to any form of "democratic" state (if that means one rendering social change possible in acceptable and stable ways). It is discourse, the conversational mode, which is needed; the telephone has made an immense contribution, not merely in the home but also in the functioning of our great institutions.

The introduction of the telephone and the growth of the nationwide network and service that evolved over the last century have contributed greatly to our changing concept of both central and local government. Subsequent developments like radio and television, which also operate with speech, are available to the whole public, and require no special skills, have given momentum to the process (although they are "one-way"). Authorities, ministers, trade union leaders, experts, the great and the famous are no longer remote, awful, or charismatic figures. They have been cut down to size as human beings, feeble or sinful at times, like any of us. The popular watchword now is participation, a word which suggests that the public wants more say in affairs. Whether such a watchword has any substance may perhaps be questioned; but as an idea there is no doubt that it owes a very great deal to the technology of speech communication through the invention of the telephone.

1. The telegraph has, of course, evolved into the Telex service today, whose rapidly expanding traffic is essential to the economic sphere, especially to the airways.

2. The Talking Drum actually mimics the human voice and is listened to as though it speaks. It does not merely send coded signals.

3. "The Telephone - Australian Experiments in 1878," Australian Telecommunication Research, 8, No. 2, 1974; reprinted from the Telegraph Electrical Society Journal, Nov.-Jan. 1877-1878, Melbourne, with the permission of the Telecommunication Society of Australia.

4. It is noteworthy that the very first words ever spoken over a telephone, by Bell himself, were an order: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you."

5. Bell demonstrated the two-way telephone and realized its conversational function in October 1876.

6. H. G. Pflaum, "Essai sur le Cursus Publicus sous le Haut-Empire Romain," Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1950; A. M. Ramsey, "The Speed of the Roman Imperial Post", Journal of Roman Studies, 15, 1925, p. 60.

7. Colin Cherry, "World Communication - Threat or Promise?" London: Wiley & Sons, 1971.