- Steve Jobs quote
- Google Data
- Bell wanted to sell to Western Telegraph
- President Rutherford quote
“It’s sort of like in 1844, the telegraph was invented, and it was an amazing breakthrough in communications. And you actually could send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. And some people talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity.
But it wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t have worked. And the reason it wouldn’t have worked was because you would have had to learn this whole sequence of strange incantations—Morse code in this case, dots and dashes in this case—to use the telegraph. And it took about forty hours to learn how to use Morse code. And a majority of people would never have learned how to use Morse code.
So fortunately, in the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell filed the patents for the telephone—another radical breakthrough in communications that performed basically the same function, but people already knew how to use it. The neatest thing about it was that, in addition to allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics.”
Steve Jobs. Make Something Wonderful.
“We exchange ideas more than information and we do most of that orally. Having text and visuals to add to understanding is nice, but we’re men and women not machines face-to-face or even over electronic media. We need to transmit and received sound. When Samuel Morris invented the telegraph, he gave us electronic interactive digital text communication. Nevertheless, we flock to Alexander Graham Bell’s analog voice telephone instead, because it better mirrors the way we live. We talk to each other.”
Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg by Bloomberg.