When the telephone was first invented, people didn’t really know what to use it for.
Some guesses: audio for telegraphs (finally!), or a primitive radio for listening to live music.
Then its users started finding their own answers.
@JamesGleick, bestselling author of Chaos and The Information, joins
@smc90 and
@rhackett to talk about The Telephone: A New History — and how users help decide what a new technology becomes.
In this episode:
00:00 – Introducing James Gleick
02:07 – The messy invention of an inevitable technology
08:15 – How network effects changed the telephone
14:29 – How farmers built a decentralized phone network from barbed wire
17:20 – What Mark Twain missed while eavesdropping on his wife’s calls
20:12 – To play monopoly or not?
31:22 – Open vs. closed systems
37:17 – What made Bell Labs (and Xerox PARC) more than one-hit wonders?
41:20 – Scientists, tinkerers, and the conditions for invention
47:22 – Debating whether AI is a fourth industrial revolution
52:11 – How technology changes the way we think
59:55 – From “ahoy” to “hello, world”