I wrote last week about the debt we carry when we develop a story in anticipation of a world that turns out not to be there as we arrive.
It is a moment we share with the lamplighter, looking at the electric lights. Or with the inventors themselves. Edison published ten uses for the phonograph in the “North American Review* in 1878. Dictation came first, music fourth, and he resisted the entertainment market for years. Bell marketed the telephone for business and emergencies and actively discouraged social calls. It was rural subscribers, women in particular, who made it an instrument of sociability. By the mid-1920s the industry surrendered and began marketing what its users had already decided.
In the early days of a new general-purpose technology, the people who invent it believe they hold the whip hand. With the telephone there was panic about who might speak to whom, fear of contagion spreading down the wire, and an unsettling of the boundary between household and public.
Adoption…