The Work of the Telephone

1916

Its Magic Has Enabled Us to Snap Our Fingers at Space.

Just how modern is the essential and ubiquitous telephone — now connecting over a half million houses and offices in New York city — there is a casual line in "Pinafore" which serves to indicate. When the kindly chorus is condoling with Ralph Rackstraw on his separation from his Josephine it chants these words to picture the terror of his lot:

"No telephone connects with his dungeon cell."

The line falls flat today. But "Pinafore" was produced for the first time in 1878, and in 1876 the Bell patents for the first practical telephone were issued. Thus when the words were written they related to a new and startling invention that was the talk of the day. and the Gilbertian line was really a gay, topical jest.

It is a safe guess, however, that very few of the people who laughed at "Pinafore" in the seventies foresaw what the telephone would really prove to be. The years of the telephone are few. But already it has transformed business method and social intercourse. The railroads, the fast trains, the telegraph, wireless, the automobile, all helped to make the nineteenth century a century of acceleration.

The telephone worked more real magic than all the rest together. The discovery of astral bodies would hardly have done more to multiply human effectiveness and enable us to snap our fingers at space. — New York Tribune.

—Stevens Point Daily Journal, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, July 29, 1916, page 3.