With respect to telephone poles
From Eula Biss, “Time and Distance Overcome,” Iowa Review, Spring 2008, excerpted in Harpers Magazine, February 2009, pgs. 19-22:
By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a “War on Telephone Poles.” Wherever telephone companies erected poles, homeowners and business owners were sawing them down, or defending their sidewalks with rifles. Property owners in Red Bank, New Jersey, threatened to tar and feather the workers putting up telephone poles. A judge found that a man who had cut down a pole because it was “obnoxious” was not guilty of malicious mischief. Telephone poles, newspaper editorials complained, were an urban blight. The poles carried a wire for each telephone – sometimes hundreds of wires. There were also telegraph wires, power lines, and trolley cables. The sky was netted with wires.
The War on Telephone Poles was fueled, in part, by the American concern for private property and the reluctance to surrender it to a shared utility. And then there was a fierce regard for aesthetics, an obsession with purity, a dislike for the way the poles and wires marred a landscape that other new inventions – skyscrapers and barbed wires – were just beginning to complicate. There was also a fear that distance, as it had always been known and measured, was collapsing.
The city council in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ordered policemen to cut down all the telephone poles in town. And the mayor of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, ordered the police chief and the fire department to chop down the telephone poles there. Only one pole was chopped down before the telephone men climbed all the poles along the line, preventing any more chopping. Bell Telephone Company stationed a man at the top of each pole as soon as it had been set, until enough poles had ben set to string a wire between them, at which point it became a misdemeanor to interfere with the poles. Even so, a constable cut down two poles holding forty or fifty wires. And the owner of a cannery ordered his workers to throw dirt back into the hole the telephone company was digging in front of his building. His men threw the dirt back in as fast as the telephone workers could dig it out. Then he sent out a team to dump a load of stones unto the hole. Eventually the pole was erected on the other side of the street.
Despite the War on Telephone Poles, it would take only four years after Bell’s first public demonstration of the telephone for every town of more than 10,000 people to be wired, although many towns were wired only to themselves. By 1900, telephones outnumbered bathtubs in America.
“Time and dist. overcome,” read an early advertisement. Rutherford B. Hayes pronounced the installation of a telephone in the White House “one of the greatest events since Creation.” The telephone, Thomas Edison declared, “annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch.”
Monday, January 19, 2009