Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
telephony became viable only with the invention of devices to amplify the
fl
flow of electrons in the early twentieth century and the rise of wireless tele-
graph services in the 1920s. By the 1930s, the capacity of international wire-
less circuits rivaled that of submarine cables. The cost, however, was frightful:
in 1927, a three-minute call between the U.S. and Britain cost $75 (Hugill
1999:137), a cost-distance so prohibitively exorbitant that only a fraction of
large corporations could use it. Submarine telephony cables crossed the
Atlantic only in 1956, when the TAT-1 line linked New York and Britain in a
pattern identical to that of the
first trans-oceanic telegraph cables a century
earlier. The capacity of transatlantic lines exploded in exponential fashion
from 36 circuits in 1956 to 11,173 in 1983; however, because these were
copper-cable systems, all of them were dwarfed by the massive capacity of
transoceanic
fi
fi
fiber optics lines that began in 1988. Trans-Paci
fi
c telephony was
later to take off,
, starting with a line connecting Vancouver, Canada, and
Hawaii in 1962. International telephony was greatly facilitated by direct
international dialing, begun by the Bell System using operators in 1963 and
allowing customers to do so in 1970.
Until the 1920s, the telephone was almost exclusively the preserve of the
wealthy and businesses. Declines in the costs of production, installation, and
utilization, however, allowed the telephone to become the
ff
first electric medium
to enter the home. “The introduction of the telephone did more than enable
people to communicate over long distances: it threatened existing class rela-
tions by extending the boundary of who may speak with whom; it also
altered modes of courtship and possibilities of romance” (Poster 1990:5).
Telephones provided a sense of privacy in communications, deepening the
long-standing bourgeois tendency to locate everyday life into the interior of
the home out of public view. The telephone enormously expanded the spatial
range of the present, and accelerated the tempos of urban life. One historian
noted in 1910 that “with the use of the telephone has come a new habit of
mind. The slow and sluggish mood has been sloughed off
fi
. . . life has become
more tense, alert, vivid” (quoted in Kern 1983:91). Telephone calls were, and
are, more immediate and intrusive than, say, written letters, and demand
rapid responses. From the beginning, the technology was deeply gendered:
popular stereotypes contrasted frivolous, talkative women with somber, task-
oriented men. The sexism of such a view equated the dynamism of electricity
with virility and masculinity, relegating the feminine to intimate, orally based
cultures (Marvin 1988).
In widening social access from face-to-face contact, the telephone expanded
the public sphere (Habermas 1989), undermining the Victorian boundary
between public and private space, allowing secrets to be transmitted to friends
and neighbors, escapes from parental scrutiny, possibilities of inappropriate
courtship or marital in
ff
delity, and contacts with unacceptable persons outside
of one's proper class or even race. Remote presence by phone lacked the
reliable cues of face-to-face contact necessary to preserve social trust and
tended to erode the insulation of pre-telephonic communities. “We shall soon
fi
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