THE TELEPHONE

A ringing history of one of technology’s most ubiquitous objects.

Gleick, an accomplished science writer, takes readers on a grand tour of a technology that was built in fits and starts on other discoveries: First, electricity had to be figured out, then the telegraph, then adapting the telegraph to the human voice, and so on. Some of the principal inventors he explores are little known. One pioneer, for instance, was a German named Philipp Reis, who created an apparatus called the Telephon in 1861. A later report called it an “acoustic telegraph,” which speaks to one of Gleick’s smart aperçus: When Samuel Morse came up with the telegraph in 1840, the patent he received “was technically called an ‘improvement,’” pointing to the fact that technology begets technology. One key player was Bell Telephone, descended from the ambitious inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and its Bell Labs, which came up with all sorts of telephonic goodies. (Who knew that the Bell Labs inventor of the bazooka was also the inventor of the answering machine?) Gleick compresses a wealth of information into an impressively fluent narrative, writing of how the area code came about, of the breakup of phone monopolies, and the extinction of the phone book with the advent of the cellphone—about which “hardly anyone cared.” Of sociological and historical interest, too, are the author’s notes on the absence of minorities in both the hierarchies of the telephone industry (with Black women hired as switchboard operators only in the years of World War II—and then grudgingly) and in advertising, all of which telegraphed a “racism [that] was pervasive and unapologetic.” On the cultural history front, too, Gleick is good on how the phone entered literature and pop fiction (again, who knew that Robert Louis Stevenson would be a pioneer?), as well as popular culture (“One-ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingy…”).

Everything you ever wanted to know about the telephone—and then some.