Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
People also worried about the loss of privacy brought about by the telephone. In
1877 the
New York Times
reported that telephone men responsible for operating an
early system in Providence, Rhode Island, overheard many confidential conversations.
The writer fretted that telephone eavesdropping would make it dangerous for anyone in
Providence to accept a nomination for public office [28].
The telephone enabled the creation of the first “online” communities. In rural areas
the most common form of phone service was the party line: a single circuit connecting
multiple phones to the telephone exchange. Party lines enabled farmers to gather by their
phones every evening to talk about the weather and exchange gossip [30].
The power of this new medium was demonstrated in the Bryan/McKinley presiden-
tial election of 1896. For the first time, presidential election returns were transmitted
directly into people's homes. “Thousands sat with their ear glued to the receiver the
whole night long, hypnotized by the possibilities unfolding to them for the first time”
[31].
For hundreds of years people dreamed of a device that would allow an individual to
produce a document that looked as if it had been typeset, but the dream was not realized
until 1867, when Americans Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule
patented the first typewriter. In late 1873 Remington & Sons Company, famous for guns
and sewing machines, produced the first commercial typewriter. It was difficult to use
and was not well received; Remington & Co. sold only 5,000 machines in the first five
years. However, the typewriter did get the attention of Mark Twain, who used it to
produce
Tom Sawy e r
, which may have been the world's first typewritten manuscript.
By 1890 more reliable typewriters were being produced, and the typewriter became a
common piece of office equipment [32].
In 1908 Charles and Howard Krum succeeded in testing an experimental machine
that allowed a modified Oliver typewriter to print a message transmitted over a telegraph
line. They called their invention the teletype. During the 1920s, news organizations
began using teletype machines to transmit stories between distant offices, and Wall
Street firms began sending records of stock transactions over teletypes.
Earlier we described how the experiments of Oersted, Sturgeon, and Henry led to the
development of the electromagnet and the telegraph. The connection between electric-
ity and magnetism remained mysterious, however, until Scottish physicist James Clerk
Maxwell published a mathematical theory demonstrating their relationship. This the-
ory predicted the existence of an electromagnetic wave spreading with the velocity of
light. It also predicted that light itself was an electromagnetic phenomenon. In 1885
Heinrich Hertz successfully generated electromagnetic waves, proving the correctness
of Maxwell's theory.
