Perils of Long Distance Telephone Calls
The Los Angeles Times • Los Angeles, California • 29 Jul 1904, Fri • Page 16
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🗞 In 1904 The Los Angeles Times warned of a future where long distance calls were common:
“It is going to make life a little more serious when the human voice can go ricocheting from Cape Cod to the free harbour of San Pedro”
It warned we’d never escape our enemies:
“In the early days, a man could come out west, change his name, marry another women, become superintendent of a Sunday-school and die respected by the whole community” also citing the just started Panama Canal & men “working on the air-ship idea.”
🗞 It went on:
📞“That’s the sort of trouble that is going to be caused when this telephone business connects the two oceans.”
📞“What chance is there now to let “the dead past bury its dead?”
📞“It will be impossible to lose oneself even by joining the Democratic Party.”
“Some people will hail the achievement as a blessing, but there is a large percentage of the inhabitants of this earth who have never conceded that the telephone in any of its forms, short or long distance, ever was or ever will be a blessing”
The piece finished with a cynical quip: “It is bad enough that talk has always been cheap, but this new scheme is carrying it too far.”
A few years later the 1918 pandemic hit, proving its usefulness.