@macdougallPeopleNetworkPolitical2013
[!info] - Cite Key: @macdougallPeopleNetworkPolitical2013 - Link: MacDougall - 2013 - The People's Network The Political Economy of the.pdf - Abstract: The Bell System dominated telecommunications in the United States and Canada for most of the twentieth century, but its monopoly was not inevitable. In the decades around 1900, ordinary citizens--farmers, doctors, small-town entrepreneurs--established tens of thousands of independent telephone systems, stringing their own wires to bring this new technology to the people. Managed by opportunists and idealists alike, these small businesses were motivated not only by profit but also by the promise of open communication as a weapon against monopoly capital and for protection of regional autonomy. As the Bell empire grew, independents fought fiercely to retain control of their local networks and companies--a struggle with an emerging corporate giant that has been almost entirely forgotten. The People's Network reconstructs the story of the telephone's contentious beginnings, exploring the interplay of political economy, business strategy, and social practice in the creation of modern North American telecommunications. Drawing from government documents in the United States and Canada, independent telephone journals and publications, and the archives of regional Bell operating companies and their rivals, Robert MacDougall locates the national debates over the meaning, use, and organization of the telephone industry as a turning point in the history of information networks. The competing businesses represented dueling political philosophies: regional versus national identity and local versus centralized power. Although independent telephone companies did not win their fight with big business, they fundamentally changed the way telecommunications were conceived. - Bibliography: MacDougall, R. 2013. The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age. Philadelphia, UNITED STATES: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Annotations¶
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Imported on 2023-03-08 6:37 pm¶
Definitions / concepts¶
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight His father, the elocutionist Alexander Melville Bell, had developed a symbolic alphabet that represented the pronunciation of any phoneme with a diagram of the lips, tongue, and palate. He called it ‘‘Visible Speech.’’
A primitive form of the modern IPA chart
Page 1 [[2023-03-08#11:51 am]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight an enviable trait to possess, but scarcely a desirable one in a business partner
double edged sword
Page 4 [[2023-03-08#12:47 pm]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight In the 1860s and 1870s, Hubbard appeared on the national scene as a persistent critic of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Western Union was one of America’s very first nation-spanning corporate monopolies.
Hubbard has been establish an as anti-monopoly/ a for the people kind of person.
Page 4 [[2023-03-08#12:48 pm]]
[!quote|#2ea8e5] Highlight In many European countries, control of telegraphy had been given to the post office, and inexpensive telegrams were widely used for social as well as business communication.
Europe is already doing it so why can't the US? Not a great argument as the two areas have very different political and cultural views. It would go against America's fundemental view of a business drawn economy.
Page 5 [[2023-03-08#12:54 pm]]
Relevant / important¶
Collapsing space time with the telephone
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Popular discussion around new media is a predictable genre, with PAGE 62 ................. 18460$ $CH2 08-27-13 11:21:45 PS MacDougall, Robert. The People's Network : The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3442309. Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2023-03-07 19:02:32. Copyright © 2013. University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved
Page 2 [[2023-03-08#11:58 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Visions of Telephony 63 conventions and cliche ́s that have stayed remarkably consistent from the days of Samuel Morse down to our own times.
Similar to what Gitelman points out, new media is something that in the early times gets debated on how it should be used and advanced,
Page 3 [[2023-03-08#11:59 am]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight This chapter describes three competing visions of telephony—three ways of understanding the technology and its purpose. These three visions and the contests between them would shape the development of telephony for decades to come. Yet all three emerged in the telephone’s early days, and each was championed by one of the Bell companies’ very first leaders. Gardiner Hubbard, the Bell Telephone Company’s first president, was animated by a quasi-populist vision of ‘‘a telephone for the people,’’ which found many adherents, though few at Bell. William Forbes, who pushed Hubbard out of his position as president, embraced a far more conservative vision of the telephone. And Theodore Vail, Bell’s first general manager and later the founder of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, articulated a third vision: an ambitious dream of ‘‘one big system,’’ a single continent-spanning network uniting telephone and telegraph under one corporation’s control.
Chapter purpose.
Bells was the idea of independence of the telephone, one not controlled by the government.
Forbes, was conservative view.
Theodore Vail's view of one big network, one where there is just the one network connecting everything no politics or economical play involved.uPage 3 [[2023-03-08#12:12 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight And arguments about the character and control of the Bell monopoly could not be separated from broader questions about the growing power of big business and the incorporation of America.
Page 3 [[2023-03-08#12:46 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The idea of a people’s telephone, and the policies and priorities it implied, was actually present at the birth of the Bell corporate system, in the person of Gardiner Greene Hubbard
Page 4 [[2023-03-08#12:47 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The telegraph monopoly’s control over the press was ‘‘absolute,’’ Hubbard warned. ‘‘It can ally itself—and probably will at no distant day—with kindred monopolies, and aspire to supreme power.’
Hubbard knew what was going on.
Page 6 [[2023-03-08#12:58 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Neither socialist nor saint, in all his enterprises Hubbard combined a civic spirit with the cheerful pursuit of private gain.
Hubbard played it smart, while he was not completely disinterested in money he did not want it to be his main goal.
Page 10 [[2023-03-08#1:18 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The high cost of growth seemed to demand regular hikes in the cost of telephone service and provided a compelling reason not to rapidly expand the network.
Page 15 [[2023-03-08#1:46 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight More dramatic proof of the changes at Bell Telephone came in November 1879, when Forbes signed a contract with Western Union, ending competition and the patent battle between the two firms
Final nail in the coffin for Hubbard's dream for the Bell company.
Page 16 [[2023-03-08#1:54 pm]]
The alliance of Bell and Western Union
The alliance of Bell and Western Union
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight rst the dozens of Bell-affiliated operating companies that leased the right to use Bell’s patents, and later the thousands of independent companies that challenged them. In large cities and in tiny hamlets, both Bell and independent operating companies faced the street-level challenges of telephony, and their innovations built the industry. American Bell did own stock in several affiliated operating companies, particularly in large markets like New York and Chicago, but these companies still remained organizationally distinct.
Page 19 [[2023-03-08#2:15 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight But Vail was beholden to neither mail nor telegraph as a model for the telephone. He was less interested in politics than either Forbes or Hubbard, and not inclined to regard the telephone as any kind of intervention in the politics of the day. If Forbes and Hubbard had anything in common, it was that both men saw the telephone as a means to some end. For Vail, the telephone network was an end in itself. What interested him most was neither profit nor the people, but rather the organization and expansion of the system.
Page 20 [[2023-03-08#2:29 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight It was he who convinced Forbes not to trade away rights to the long-distance market in his negotiations with Western Union in 1879.73 And Vail was almost certainly the first person at Bell to articulate a dream of uniting all the nation’s telephone exchanges in ‘‘one great big general system.’’ That vision became the central theme of his long and spectacular career.
Vail was a genius, all the main ideas that led the company to where it is was thanks to Vail.
Page 21 [[2023-03-08#2:34 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight nd a counterweight to efforts by Vail and others to centralize authority at American Bell. In many ways, the NTEA, and not American Bell, was the real center of the American telephone industry at this time.
A competitor to Bell, while Bell definetly was a huge company they didnt actually control much of the switching between lines, the whole base of Bell was built on theses smaller companies actually using their products.
Page 22 [[2023-03-08#2:37 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The slump also damaged Vail’s dreams for long distance. In March 1884, the Southern New England Telephone Company completed construction of a two-hundred-mile-long line from Boston to New York City.
Page 24 [[2023-03-08#2:44 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Vail’s vision suffered another blow in May 1885, when the Massachusetts state legislature rejected American Bell’s request to increase its capitalization from $10 million to $30 million.
Page 24 [[2023-03-08#2:44 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight Nowhere was the imprint of the Bostonians’ conservative policies deeper or longer lasting than on the Bell Telephone Company of Canada. American Bell’s Boston investors organized the creation of Bell Canada in 1880. At first, Alexander Graham Bell and his father had hoped to sell the rights to the telephone in Canada to a Canadian firm.
Page 26 [[2023-03-08#6:06 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight The most egregious example of Bell Canada’s conservatism in these years was its willful neglect of French Canadian customer
Page 27 [[2023-03-08#6:19 pm]]
[!quote|#a28ae5] Highlight the very large proportion of French speaking people here ...itseems to us, could never be induced to use the telephone even at extremely low rates
Page 28 [[2023-03-08#6:20 pm]]
Agree¶
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight This demanded deliberation in advance about where the wires would go. And that turned telegraph and telephone construction into a series of debates over intercommunication and interdependence. Who would or should be communicating with whom? As Americans and Canadians built their first telegraph and telephone networks, they were making speech visible, mapping and constructing the channels through which commerce and communication would travel
Page 2 [[2023-03-08#11:56 am]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The U.S. Postal Service was by the late nineteenth century a true mass medium, more extensive and accessible than the postal system of any other country, and seen by most Americans as a crucial democratic good. The telegraph, by contrast, was the child and agent of private business. By the 1860s, the Western Union Telegraph Company enjoyed a near monopoly on long-distance telegraphy. It served large businesses and very wealthy individuals, and it made possible an unprecedented private monopoly in the national distribution of news and information
The Idea of something being made for the people as a fundamental right of communication or something that is a luxury that should be profitable.
Page 2 [[2023-03-08#11:57 am]]
Business differences for the telephone
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight But with the coming of the war, and aided by a close relationship with the Union Army, Western Union broke ranks with the rest of the industry in a bid for national supremacy. By 1866, it had absorbed its major rivals, cementing a near monopoly over long-distance telegraphy in the United States.
Playing politics to break a treaty, going against good faith, breaking treaties all the line the wallets of the shareholder.
Page 4 [[2023-03-08#12:49 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Accessible and affordable communication ought to be the basic democratic right of all Americans, he said. A ‘‘telegraph for the people’’ would liberate the flow of information, nurture democracy, and strengthen the republic against the machinations of corporate financiers.
Page 5 [[2023-03-08#12:55 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight information almost as valuable as the commodities themselves, gave the company real influence over farmers, businessmen, and investors. And an exclusive contract with the New York Associated Press gave Western Union immense leverage against any newspaper that dared to criticize it.
This is a big idea, the one who controls the media can dictate what information is said. Without competition everyone is forced to agree with the company as there are no alternatives. The Idea that Western Union pretty much controls what the New York Press can publish which is inhibiting free speech, and freedom of the press, a constitutional right for American's.
Page 6 [[2023-03-08#12:58 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Western Union was the first American company of any kind to forge a national monopoly out of what had previously been a competitive industry
Page 6 [[2023-03-08#12:59 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Western Union controlled perhaps 90 percent of the telegraph market in the United States.
Wow! thats a huge number. Giving a modern perspective, people are protesting the rogers-shaw merge when Rogers only has 35% of the market share on mobile phone plans.
Page 6 [[2023-03-08#1:04 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight In geographic scope, Western Union dwarfed even the railroads, the largest corporations of the day
Page 6 [[2023-03-08#1:00 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight In a way, the telegraph network was the economy, or at least served as a vivid proxy for abstractions like the market, interdependence, or big business
Again, Western Union pretty much had complete control over the economy, if they did not like what one person was doing they would cut them off from there service practically dooming their business.
Page 6 [[2023-03-08#1:01 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The idea of the mail as a medium of the people and a basic civic good offered a critical counterpoint to the precedent of the telegraph in the early development of the telephone.
Page 7 [[2023-03-08#1:06 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Bell’s ingenuity offered Hubbard a way to challenge Western Union without government action, and to make a healthy profit as well
I think this is foreshadowing into something ironic.
Page 7 [[2023-03-08#1:07 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Hubbard encouraged local entrepreneurs to establish their own telephone businesses, leasing Bell equipment in return for an annual commission. Hubbard was an effective promoter, and within a few months of establishing Bell Telephone, he had granted dozens of local and regional licenses. In another year, there were hundreds of tiny telephone fiefdoms like the Muncie Bell Telephone Company of Lloyd Wilcoxon and Milton Long
I think this is a smart tactic. Let others set up their own networks and they only have to pay Bell a commission fee. Got the system running with low cost on his part. This is similar to what McDonald's does today, they make it cheap for the new owners to start one up but McDonald's collects a licensing fee and own the real estate.
Page 8 [[2023-03-08#1:11 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight It cast the telephone as an ongoing service rather than a discrete product and kept the parent company involved in the distribution and operation of its instruments over time.
Page 9 [[2023-03-08#1:12 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight After rising profits made it possible for Bell to contemplate buying up its affiliates, Hubbard argued vigorously against such a move
Trying to keep his morals up.
Page 9 [[2023-03-08#1:13 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight In promoting the telephone to consumers, Hubbard cast the device as an answer to the evils of Western Union. His earliest promotional material stressed what he saw as the telephone’s chief advantages over the telegraph: it was simple enough to be used by anyone; it required no knowledge of Morse code; and it admitted no third parties, in the form of telegraph clerks or messengers, into private communications.
Smart. With Hubbard making Western Union look evil, something that a growing amount of the population shared this view allowed Hubbard to market it as an alternative solution to overthrow this monopoly.
Page 9 [[2023-03-08#1:15 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Hubbard set the price for telephones in the home at half the price of telephones in the workplace and strove to keep costs within reach of the middle-class Americans that Western Union so conspicuously ignored.
Trying to capitalize on a market Western Union has not entered.
Page 10 [[2023-03-08#1:17 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The Bell partnership suddenly faced two expensive battles with a wealthy and determined rival—one on the streets for subscribers, and one in court to protect Alexander Graham Bell’s patents. Sanders tried to convince Hubbard to sell out to Western Union, which he feared would otherwise ‘‘crush’’ both men ‘‘by fair means or foul.’’
Even if Bell partership was in the right the Western Union had a huge cash reserve they could spend on lobbying and making this case go in favor of them. They had the resources to pretty much do whatever they want.
Page 11 [[2023-03-08#1:23 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Known colloquially as ‘‘the Forbes group,’’ they were men of money and aristocratic mien, conservative Boston Brahmins with no sympathy for populist unrest.
Pretty much the opposite of Hubbard.
Page 12 [[2023-03-08#1:26 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight He was politically active as an opponent of the labor movement and similar causes. Forbes fought the unionization of railway workers and efforts to regulate the railroads by farmers in western and midwestern states. He published a biweekly circular defending the gold standard against currency reforms and raised substantial sums for ‘‘sound money’’ Republicans.
Pro money, anit-people.
Page 12 [[2023-03-08#1:27 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight ‘‘I am opposed to low rates unless made necessary by competition,’’
funny because they are pushing out the competition on their own. They are doing the same things the British Telegraph companies did, whenever any new competition tries to emerge they drop their prices to a completely unprofitable level using their cash reserves to push through it. This left the small startup with little to no reserve unable to keep up because it was unprofitable from the beginning forcing them into either joining them or going bankrupt. The outcome for small company did not matter.
Page 13 [[2023-03-08#1:39 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight They avoided debt and privileged short-term profits over long-term expansion. Such conservative policies would persist at Bell long after the perils of the early 1880s had passed.
Page 14 [[2023-03-08#1:41 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight But Bell’s owners discovered to their dismay that economies of scale did not apply to the telephone. In fact, it cost more per subscriber to serve a large telephone exchange than a small one. This is simply a mathematical property of networks. Consider a tiny system connecting three telephones. There are six potential connections the operator may be asked to make: A may call B or C, B may call A or C, C may call A or B. But if just one phone is added to this network, there are suddenly twelve potential connections between the four subscribers. Add a fifth subscriber and there are twenty possible PAGE 74 ................. 18460$ $CH2 08-27-13 11:21:52 PS MacDougall, Robert. The People's Network : The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3442309. Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2023-03-07 19:02:32. Copyright © 2013. University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved
It basically increases exponentially the more customers you have. Everytime a new connection is added every connection that was already in the network now has to connect to the new one (A Mesh Topology). At the time they did not have the technology to use more efficient forms of networks.
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[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Visions of Telephony 75 connections, a sixth and there are thirty.
Page 15 [[2023-03-08#1:42 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight As the number of telephones in any community grew, the number of potential connections and the amount of actual telephone traffic grew far more rapidly than revenue from new subscribers. Switchboards became increasingly complex, as did the work required to operate them. As a result of these diseconomies of scale, providing telephone service in large cities soon cost three to four times what it cost in smaller communities.
Since its an physical board that has to connected to form a connection there is a lot more the operator needs to know, a wider range of potential connections means a harder job.
Page 15 [[2023-03-08#1:45 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The company’s leaders flatly denied that the telegraph would, should, or even could become a medium of popular communication.
Fair on them, why would they market to others if it means less profit?
Page 15 [[2023-03-08#1:47 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight More broadly, Western Union agreed to acknowledge Alexander Graham Bell as the sole inventor of the telephone and withdrew from the telephone industry in exchange for a promise to cooperate with the telegraph, rather than compete, in the transmission of long-distance messages
Page 17 [[2023-03-08#1:55 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Observers hailed the Bell contract with Western Union as a victory for both sides and the salvation of the fledgling firm. National Bell shares, selling for fifty dollars in March 1879, surged to nearly one thousand dollars per share the day after the agreement was signed
Page 17 [[2023-03-08#1:58 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight American Bell’s owners never had complete command over the other Bell companies, nor could they control the ways that those outside their company used or imagined the telephone.
There is still some Hope for Hubbard's vision, since not all companies using Bell phones are still semi-independent.
Page 18 [[2023-03-08#2:03 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight This was the dream of ‘‘one big system’’: a single, continent-spanning telephone network, controlled by one corporation, connecting every subscriber in the nation and perhaps even the world. The man most associated with the idea of a unified Bell System was present in the industry almost from the start. But his dream of consolidation remained idiosyncratic at this time, not embraced by the Boston owners of American Bell, and actively resisted by the decentralized federation of operating companies that made up the nineteenth-century telephone business.
The extreme of the three views, total domination of the market. The idea that everything should fall under one company. This would be a horrible idea because this company would pretty much be a dictatorship of what information could and could not be told. They would have complete control of policing the media.
Page 18 [[2023-03-08#2:13 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight These technological systems seemed to offer arguments for the ideal of system itself—for the standardization of procedures, the consolidation of ownership, and the centralization of control. ‘‘A railway, like a vast machine, the wheels of which are all connected with each other... requires a certain harmony, [and] cannot be worked by a number of independent agents,’’ declared one 1850 treatise on the economy of railways. ‘‘The organization of a railway requires unity of direction and harmony of movement, which can only be attained by the combination of the entire carrying business with the general administration of the road.’’70 Vail would echo this language all his life.
The idea of effsioncy was now truly a concern. With the foundation of all these technologies like the railroad, and telegraphy the economy has been increasing tremendously. The idea now is that instead of focusing on a new idea it was better to create systems to improve what they already had, so more people can afford it and also more traffic on the network without increasing scale alone.
Page 20 [[2023-03-08#2:27 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight ‘‘The connection of many towns together . . . made it of importance to bring as large areas as possible under one management,’’ Vail wrote in 1883.
Page 22 [[2023-03-08#2:37 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight ‘‘Will it pay?’
money
Page 22 [[2023-03-08#2:38 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight ‘‘It was almost suggested that the life of the average American would be incomplete were he to omit from his daily routine the pleasure of telephoning to his friends in Japan,’’ said one.
Page 22 [[2023-03-08#2:39 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight The Boston circle did not share his expansive ambitions for the telephone and echoed the doubts of local management about the profitability of long distance.
Different view points.
Page 23 [[2023-03-08#2:40 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Vail saw this dip as temporary, part of a general ‘‘dullness’’ in the economy that year. Others disagreed. ‘‘The telephone business has passed through its ‘booming’ stage, and . . . the pendulum is now at the other end of its swing,’’ declared Electrical Review.
Page 23 [[2023-03-08#2:41 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Some felt Vail’s ‘‘anxiety to obtain subscribers’’ had been too great.
Too keen to make a name for himself, even though he already has. This could lead to a downfall.
Page 23 [[2023-03-08#2:42 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight ‘‘The American Bell desires to connect every system in the United States . . . so that direct telephoning may be accomplished to all parts of the country,’’ company attorneys told the legislature. ‘‘What objection can there be to this?’’ State legislators, however, felt American Bell was already large enough, and, like many of Vail’s employers and colleagues, they doubted whether long-distance telephony was widely desired or even possible.
A big but subtle development, the government stepping in and saying that their monopoly is big enough.
Page 24 [[2023-03-08#3:12 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight But in truth, Bell Canada had closer ties to Boston than many of the Bell operating companies in the United States. American Bell owned about one-third of Bell Canada’s voting stock in 1885 and held four positions on its eight-member board of directors. Bell Canada relied heavily on American Bell for capital and equipment and conferred with Boston on policy and rates.
Damn, not independent. A sort of puppet company for Bell in Canada.
Page 27 [[2023-03-08#6:07 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight It is difficult to measure the autonomy of Bell Canada under Charles Sise because, in contrast to many American operating company managers, his policies and philosophies were so closely aligned with the Bostonians
Again, the idea that Bell Canada is more of a proxy then independent.
Page 27 [[2023-03-08#6:18 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight Charles Sise kept in close contact with Boston throughout the affair, remarking to one friend that he was ‘‘merely the mouthpiece of the Am[erican] Bell in the matter.’’
Page 28 [[2023-03-08#6:24 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight In certain markets, as the previous chapter discussed, the company did offer lower rates and sometimes even free service in order to eliminate a local competitor, but these were temporary measures.
More anti-competetive behavior
Page 29 [[2023-03-08#6:26 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight But the three traditions represented by Gardiner Hubbard, William Forbes, and Theodore Vail exerted powerful influences in decades to come. Hubbard’s hopeful vision of a telephone for the people, Forbes’s conservative understanding of the same technology, and Vail’s ambitious dream of one big system were all present at or near the birth of the many Bells. These ideas would shape and define the battles over the telephone for many years thereafter
Page 30 [[2023-03-08#6:33 pm]]
[!quote|#5fb236] Highlight One thing that Forbes and Hubbard both seemed to understand was that ideas about the telephone were inescapably political. They involved arguments about monopoly and competition, about national and local commerce, and about the proper scale of business and social life.
A good summary on why the telephone is a political tool.
Page 30 [[2023-03-08#6:34 pm]]
Disagree¶
[!quote|#ff6666] Highlight While traveling around the country on behalf of his postal commission, Hubbard carried a pair of telephones to demonstrate in every city he visited
Page 8 [[2023-03-08#1:09 pm]]
[!quote|#ff6666] Highlight It was not meant to be an answer to monopoly or a new mass medium. It was simply a tool of commerce, a modest refinement of the telegraph, most useful for well-to-do men much like themselves.
It is a new form of medium though, one which continues to develop for decades.
Page 13 [[2023-03-08#1:33 pm]]
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