Sebastian Giessmann. The Connectivity of Things. Network Cultures since 1832. The MIT Press. 2024
Chapter Reviewed: Chapter 5: Telephones, Exchanges, and Voices Around 1890
Review by: Karisa Bridgelal, Syracuse University
In chapter five of The Connectivity of Things, “Telephones, Exchanges, and Voices Around 1890,” Sebastian Giessmann explores how telephony evolved from a localized hands-on practice to an expansive automated system due to the evolution of cultural, economic, and communicative infrastructure in the United States. Giessmann begins by reminding readers that the materiality that enables the technology of the telephone has become somewhat effaced in daily life. Furthermore, early telephone apparatus, like switchboards and dials, have become relics, and are now relegated to museums, and the knowledge required to operate them has largely vanished. Giessmann endeavors to articulate that while the telephone was a marvel for communication—“very much in the sense of the ‘speaking telegraph’”— it also influenced the very notion of communication by creating a liminal space of ongoing connectivity (76). Thus, this continuous, uninterrupted communication also blurs the lines between meaningful connections and disorienting noise, highlighting the loss of understanding about how life operated before the telephone’s invention.
A majority of this chapter is dedicated to the history of the telephone, by highlighting its revolutionary inventor and public advocate, Alexander Graham Bell. In tracing Bell’s
public demonstrations of the telephone in music halls and theaters, Giessmann attempts to steer readers toward understanding that from its conception, even Bell visualized the telephone as surpassing its potential beyond communication. Bell attempted to persuade audiences that the telephone could be deployed as a network that would be vital to urban infrastructure and development by marketing it not as a luxury but as a necessity similar to water lines and gas systems. While there were main concerns with the deployment of the telephone systems from electrical interference in larger city areas to the cost of battery supplies, Bell’s vision began to spread across smaller towns in America like New Haven. Giessmann also traces the telephone’s expansion from Bell’s declining role to other pioneers, such as Clément Ader in Paris and Tivadar Puskás in Budapest who took over the task of popularizing telephone technology, to Edwin Holmes, who integrated telephone lines into his Boston burglar alarm company in 1877. This demonstrates the telephone increasing crossover with security and surveillance infrastructures.
Equally compelling is Giessmann’s discussion of how the telephone, beyond personal communication, became a bureaucratic instrument of control. While its initial reception emphasized connectivity and immediacy, telephony soon played a role in reinforcing hierarchical power structures. Beyond the technical and economic dimensions, Giessmann highlights the gendered labor embedded in the early telephone industry. During the age of switchboards, this infrastructure of connectivity was mainly supported by a labor force of women, known as “telephone girls.” However, with the invention of automatic exchanges by Almon Brown Strowger in 1981, their presence was deemed obsolete. Therefore, Giessmann invites readers to consider not only the technological trajectory of the telephone, but the broader discourse regarding the implications of automatation, and gender displacement, which also contributes to the loss of embodied knowledge in the history of telephone exchange.
Throughout the chapter, Giessmann attempted to capture how the telephone was an open-ended, experimental device. It surpassed what Bell could have conceptualized, bolstered by economic and societal factors and technical improvements. Furthermore, Giessmann parallels the development of the telephone with metaphysical and spiritualistic practices, steering the discourse toward the expansive role of voice and connectivity across disciplines, thought, and time. For instance, innovations such as the Théâtrophone in Paris and the Electrophone in London, which transmitted live theater and opera performances, reveal an early recognition of the telephone’s potential as a medium for entertainment and mass communication. From my understanding, Giessmann positions the telephone as a malleable socio-technical artifact that not only pioneered connectivity but was also deeply shaped by shifting cultural dimensions due to its central but dynamic role in social communication.