“When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, no one anywhere, Bell included, saw its full potential. Many didn’t see any potential for it at all. Executives from Western Union famously dismissed the phone as “an electrical toy.†So Bell proceeded independently and did rather well out of it, to say the least. The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent ever granted. All Bell did really was put together existing technologies. The components necessary to make telephones had existed for thirty years, and the principles were understood. For most people the telephone was such an incomprehensible novelty that Bell had to explain exactly what it did. Displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876, it attracted little attention. Most visitors were far more impressed by an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison. Phones were originally seen as providing services—weather reports, stock market news, fire alarms, musical entertainment, even lullabies to soothe restless babies. Nobody saw them as being used primarily for gossip, social intercourse, or keeping in touch with friends and family. The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd. By the early twentieth century Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone & Telegraph, was the largest corporation in America, with stock worth $1,000 a share. (When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 331). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 331). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 330-331). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 330). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 329). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 326). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 326). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
