The first network effect was a phone call (ft. James Gleick)

James Gleick (0:00)

People always dreamed of being able to communicate across long distances, but there was no practical way to do that until the telegraph arrived.

Robert Hackett (0:08)

I wonder how the world would be different if Bell and his team had not been awarded the patent for the phone.

James Gleick (0:14)

That patent was ridiculous. There was literally bribery involved. The telephone was a technology that was defined by its users, not by the people who made it and sold it.

Sonal Chokshi (0:24)

The first industrial revolution is driven by machines. Second industrial revolution is driven by electricity. The third industrial revolution, which some people would call the information age. Some would argue we're now entering a fourth age. What might you call that?

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the A6NZ Frontier Show. I am so excited to have as our very special guest today, someone that we are huge fans of, James Gleick, who is the author of a new book called The Telephone, A New History. Robert and I are co-hosting this episode. And both of us are huge fans of his writings. In fact, I think we were both bonding Robert over Chaos, which actually is a book that captivated me as a child. And I remember just being like, wow, it opened up a whole new world of science writing and journalism that I didn't even know was possible back then. James has also written books on Feynman, Genius, Isaac Newton, Time Travel, and much more. This new book is a history of America's first modern world rearranging technology. Not even the inventors realized what it was good for and how ubiquitous it would become.

And The Phone would prove less an invention and more a continuous revolution. It would create a profession, enable the skyscraper, world war, the assembly line, and the multinational corporation. And then, of course, there's the science that Bell Labs created around the telephone. So this is a very rich book. And I think we'll just jump right into it by talking about the telephone as a device, kind of a network, and then more broadly, the innovation process and backstory.

Robert Hackett (2:05)

So James, ahoy.

Sonal Chokshi (2:07)

Ahoy.

Robert Hackett (2:09)

Got to start off that way with Alexander Graham Bell's preferred method of greeting. I thought we could start here, which is about the nature of invention and how so often we are fed this fairy tale version of the lone genius having some eureka moment and then, you know, an idea springing fully formed from their head into the world. And one thing I love about your book is how it adds complexity and nuance to that story, especially in the case of the telephone.

You know, I think many people are familiar from their time in grade school learning that Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone. He, you know, picked up the two receivers with wire strung between them. He asked Watson to come hither if he was there and like that. And then we're off to the races after that. But that's not actually what happened. It's more interesting, more complex than that. There was prior precedent. There were competing claims to the invention. So I thought maybe you could just kind of describe some of what you found when you looked into this in doing this archaeology, this excavation of telephony.

James Gleick (3:19)

It's true. And we know a world where sending your voice long distances is completely unremarkable. I mean, we're using a telephone right now. We're very far apart geographically. We are speaking and creating sound waves in the room. And the sound waves are being converted into electricity. And almost instantaneously, you are hearing what I'm saying because the electricity is reconverted into sound waves at your end. And that is the telephone idea.

And it didn't exist. I mean, people always dreamed of being able to communicate across long distances, but there was no practical way to do that until the telegraph arrived. And then the telegraph, in the time of which we speak, was rapidly transforming the world. Everybody understood how important it was. It was making a lot of money. Wires were crisscrossing the United States, and people were sending messages electrically. So that was fantastic. And so it was natural when the telephone started to arrive to think of it as a kind of extension of the telegraph, something new. And it was the telegraph, but you add voice. And a lot of people made that mistake, including the president of Western Union, which had something close to a telegraph monopoly, who was offered the first patent for the telephone and said, that's just a toy. What use could I possibly make of that?