Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Telephones allowed not only point-to-point contact but also served as a
medium to mass audiences at public gatherings, theaters, and political rallies.
With party lines, phones rang along the entire network between caller and
receiver, and any intermediary could listen in. Switching and transmission
technologies freed users from this limitation. Automated switching,
fi
rst
installed in La Porte, Indiana in 1892, made the telephone signi
fi
cantly more
user-friendly. Vacuum tube ampli
ort during
World War I, generated higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths, which
allowed for much longer telephone lines; by 1915, these connected New York
with San Francisco and united the continental United States into one inte-
grated telephonic space (Abler 1977). Hugill (1999) argues that the telephone
played three roles in the rise of U.S. hegemony, including linking the urban
system together, fostering commercial networks, and expanding access to
international markets.
As with the globe and stop-watch, the telephone was originally the sole
preserve of the rich, only to become steadily democratized over time. Aside
from a few wealthy households, businesses and corporations formed the
fi
ers, developed as part of the e
ff
rst
major market. The instrument facilitated the centralized control of head-
quarters in multi-establishment
fi
firms, themselves a product of the massive
time-space compression that generated a national economy, the detachment
of white-collar of
fi
floors, and the coordin-
ation of production and delivery schedules, greatly reducing the levels of
uncertainty. Banks developed coast-to-coast networks, and retailers utilized it
to place and accept orders and reservations. As prices fell, the popularity of
telephones rose exponentially: the number of telephones in the U.S. exploded
from 2,593 in 1870 to 1,109,073 in 1900 to 12,601,935 in 1920.
The rise of American telephony in large part is the story of AT&T, which
arose in 1899 to become one of history's only true monopolies. In 1909,
AT&T acquired a dominant share of Western Union, and although it was
forced to sell this in 1913, by 1925 it enjoyed a “natural monopoly” by virtue
of its extensive and expensive infrastructure. As always when pro
ce work from blue-collar factory
fl
t governs
the allocation of resources, core regions acquired the new technology and put
it to e
fi
ective use long before the periphery. Although most households had
acquired a telephone by 1930, providers were generally reluctant to o
ff
ff
er
service to low-density, high-cost, and thus low-pro
t, rural areas. Indeed,
parts of the South did not acquire telephony until the 1970s. The time-space
compression of telephony thus mirrored the uneven development of the
American space-economy in general, even as it ultimately played a major role
in transforming it.
In Europe, a series of incompatible nationalized systems e
fi
ectively thwarted
international integration until the 1970s (Hugill 1999). In Britain, for example,
the Post O
ff
rst
international telephone calls were exchanged between Paris and Brussels in
1887. The
ce achieved an early monopoly over the technology. The
fi
first telephone cable to cross the English Channel, linking Paris
and London, was laid in 1891. A
fi
ff
ordable and dependable long-distance
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