Americans Didn’t Panic About the Telephone. We Didn’t Need To.

Exactly 150 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell made the world’s first phone call. “Come here,” he shouted into the fuzzy, one-way phone line at his partner Thomas Watson. “I want you!” (He had spilled acid on himself.) With these words, he sparked a revolution in ordinary life. As the telephone spread, people could call for help when their home caught on fire, talk to a doctor if their child was sick or simply speak with someone more than a block away. I began researching the telephone after learning of an obscene caller who plagued my grandmother in the 1950s. I was surprised such things went on then. I was more surprised to learn obscene calls happened in the 1890s. The telephone wrought great changes, and yet in reviewing over 40,000 articles—including every headline in a newspaper database containing “telephone” or “phone” for the technology’s first 30 years of existence—I found no evidence of panic. There was nothing like the current alarm over, say, smartphones. Histories of the phone don’t show much distress, either. “There was little serious controversy about the telephone,” Claude Fischer wrote in his study “America Calling.”

[Andrew Heisel is a writer based in New Haven (CT). He is writing a history of the telephone’s dark side.]