Another poignant poem by Hilaire Belloc, about The Telephone.
To-night in million-voiced London I
Was lonely as the million-pointed sky
Until your single voice. Ah! So the sun
Peoples all heaven, although he be but one.
But the telephone has always been a mixed blessing. For one thing, it can bring on reactions like those of Peter Robinsons Inspector Banks, always having ‘that same empty, lonely feeling after he had spoken to someone he loved over the telephone, as if the silence had somehow become charged with that persons absence.’
“Andy Warhol said the telephone was 'the most intimate & exclusive of all media' but that was before the portable” wrote Martin Woollacott in 1998 – how quaint that ‘portable’ sounds now.
Feelings were mixed from the beginning. Lady Frederick Cavendish called it ‘a wretched new craze’, & Sir Edward Grey found it ‘a deadly disadvantage; it minces time into fragments & frays the spirit’
The inventors of new technology, or at least those of our betters who make it their business to decide what is good for us, usually have lofty aims for the use to which it can be put.
And so it was seriously thought that the prime use for the telephone, once enough lines & exchanges were in place to make it possible to imagine one available in every home, was as a medium to bring culture to the masses – sit round your phone & listen to Carmen live from Covent Garden!
Oddly enough, such a system was set up – Matthew Parris did a Radio Archive about the Electrophone not so long ago. The producers had even found a woman who was old enough to have experienced it in her grandparents house.
But no, what we really want it for is gossip & keeping in touch with friends & family.
The mobile was thought of as something only for (self) important people who believed the world could not get by without instant access to their sage advice or decisions. Why would the rest of us want to be at the beck & call of the office?
But it was the teenage craze for texting & gossiping which really stimulated the market conditions which made it possible for most of us to have them – though some of us still keep it turned off more than on
