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concluded that eerie music piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the real
selling-point of his invention. Instead, the telephone was about speech--individual,
personal speech, the human voice, human conversation and human interaction. The
telephone was not to be managed from any centralized broadcast center. It was to be a
personal, intimate technology.
When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold output of a
machine--you were speaking to another human being. Once people realized this, their
instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie, unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A
"telephone call" was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another human
being, someone you would generally know and recognize. The real point was not what
the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person and citizen,
could do THROUGH the machine. This decision on the part of the young Bell Company
was absolutely vital.
The first telephone networks went up around Boston-- mostly among the technically
curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment of the American populace that, a
hundred years later, would be buying personal computers). Entrenched backers of the
telegraph continued to scoff.
But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous. A train crashed in Tarriffville,
Connecticut. Forward- looking doctors in the nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's
"speaking telephone" installed. An alert local druggist was able to telephone an entire
community of local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. The disaster, as disasters
do, aroused intense press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness in the real
world.
After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass. By 1890 it was all over

New England. By '93, out to Chicago. By '97, into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By
1904 it was all over the continent.
The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell (now generally known as
"Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree) became quite wealthy. He lost interest in
the tedious day-to-day business muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully
returned his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various laboratories, which were
now much larger, better-ventilated, and gratifyingly better-equipped. Bell was never to
have another great inventive success, though his speculations and prototypes anticipated
fiber-optic transmission, manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction,
and Montessori education. The "decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound
intensity, was named after Bell.
Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated by human eugenics. He
also spent many years developing a weird personal system of astrophysics in which
gravity did not exist.
Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a hypochondriac, and throughout his
life he habitually stayed up until four A.M., refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had
accomplished a great feat; he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and great
personal charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him something of a loose cannon
on deck. Bell maintained a thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion in Washington,
D.C., which gave him considerable backstage influence in governmental and scientific
circles. He was a major financial backer of the the magazines SCIENCE and
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, both still flourishing today as important organs of the
American scientific establishment.
Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd, became the
ardent political disciple of a 19th- century science-fiction writer and would-be social
reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod the boards briefly as a Shakespearian actor.
There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but in years to come there would
be surprising numbers of people like him. Bell was a prototype of the high-tech
entrepreneur. High- tech entrepreneurs will play a very prominent role in this book: not
merely as technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical frontier, who can
carry the power and prestige they derive from high-technology into the political and
social arena.
Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of his own technological territory. As
the telephone began to flourish, Bell was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the defense
of his patents. Bell's Boston lawyers were excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an
elocution teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly effective legal witness.
In the eighteen years of Bell's patents, the Bell company was involved in six hundred
separate lawsuits. The legal records printed filled 149 volumes. The Bell Company won
every single suit.
After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies sprang up all over

America. Bell's company, American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble. In 1907,
American Bell Telephone fell into the hands of the rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial
cartel, robber-baron speculators who dominated Wall Street.
At this point, history might have taken a different turn. American might well