What must it have been like, writing in quiet moments when letters were the only way to communicate across distance? To correspond with someone whose voice we might never have heard? How terrible, the long wait for a piece of paper with handwritten words, guessing at their intonation. And how differently terrible—and yet miraculous—the intimate sound of the voice in our ears, invisible and unmitigated by the deliciousness of waiting, of messages thought-out and composed.  

Investors were skeptical of Alexander Graham Bell’s vision for a vast network connecting every house in the country. Initially, telephone poles were viewed as urban blight and homeowners were legally exonerated for cutting them down. Each individual telephone needed its own wire, so hundreds of wires could be attached to a pole. The heavens became a scratched-up tangle of dark lines; we could no longer look up from a street and see the open sky.

Mark Twain was among the first Americans to own a telephone, of which he ambivalently said, “The human voice carries entirely too far as it is.” But by the end of the century, there were more telephones than bathtubs in America, and Thomas Edison said the telephone “annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch.”

Did Edison foresee what it might mean for time and space to be annihilated, how waiting might become abnormal and silence become suspicious when distance and time—our old obstacles and our protection—were known and measured entirely anew?

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Links:

• Essay: "Time and Distance Overcome" by Eula Biss

  
  

• The Telephone and How it Changed Us - Science Museum, London

  
  

• “The telephone is the instrument of the devil” – early Swedish response to telephones by Marika Ehrenkrona for Ericsson

  
  

Special thanks to Peter Wallace for suggesting the telephone.

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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