ce was not the real
selling-point of his invention. Instead, the telephone was about
speech--individual, personal speech, the human voice, human
conversation and human interaction. The telephone was not to be
managed from any centralized broadcast center. It was to be a
personal, intimate technology.

When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold output
of a machine--you were speaking to another human being. Once people
realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie,
unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was not a
"call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another human being,
someone you would generally know and recognize. The real point was not
what the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a
person and citizen, could do THROUGH the machine. This decision on the
part of the young Bell Company was absolutely vital.

The first telephone networks went up around Boston--mostly among the
technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment of the
American populace that, a hundred years later, would be buying personal
computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph continued to scoff.

But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous. A train
crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-looking doctors in the
nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed.
An alert local druggist was able to telephone an entire community of
local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. The disaster, as
disasters do, aroused intense press coverage. The phone had proven its
usefulness in the real world.

After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass. By
1890 it was all over New England. By '93, out to Chicago. By '97,
into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was all over the
continent.

The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell (now
generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree)
became quite wealthy. He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day
business muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully
returned his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various
laboratories, which were now much larger, better-ventilated, and
gratifyingly better-equipped. Bell was never to have another great
inventive success, though his speculations and prototypes anticipated
fiber-optic transmission, manned flight, sonar, hydrofoi