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The war on telephone poles

By Eula Biss

By Eula Biss, from “Time and Distance Overcome,” in the Spring issue of Iowa Review. Biss’s collection Notes from No Man’s Land will be published this month by Graywolf Press. Her essay “The Pain Scale” appeared in the June 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Of what use is such an invention?” the New York World asked in 1876 after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone. The nation was not waiting for the telephone. Bell’s financial backers asked him not to work on his invention because it seemed too dubious an investment. The idea on which the telephone depended—that every home in the country could be connected with a vast network of wires suspend ed from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart—seemed far less likely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

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SEE ALSO: Bell, Alexander Graham; Crimes against; Knowledge—Telephone; Lynching; Telephone; Vandalism

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