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“Touch Someone”: The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability

1988; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.1988.0001

1097-3729

Claude S. Fischer,

American History and Culture

"Touch Someone": The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability CLAUDE S. FISCHER The familiar refrain, "Reach out, reach out and touch someone," has been part of American Telephone and Telegraph's (AT&T's) campaign urging use of the telephone for personal conversations. Yet, the telephone industry did not always promote such sociability; for decades it was more likely to discourage it. The industry's "discov­ ery" of sociability illustrates how structural and cultural constraints interact with public demand to shape the diffusion of a technology. While historians have corrected simplistic notions of "autonomous technology" in showing how technologies are produced, we know much less about how consumers use technologies. We too often Dr. Fischer is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Some material presented here was initially delivered to the Social Science History Asso­ ciation, Washington, D.C., October 1983. The research was supported by the Na­ tional Endowment for the Humanities (grant RO-20612), the National Science Foundation (grant SES83-09301), the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Committee on Research, University of California, Berkeley. Further work was conducted as a Fel­ low at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, Califor­ nia, with financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Archival research was facilitated by the generous assistance of people in the telephone indus­ try: at AT&T, Robert Lewis, Robert Garnet, and Mildred Ettlinger; at the San Fran­ cisco Pioneer Telephone Museum, Don Thrall, Ken Rolin, and Norm Hawker; at the Museum of Independent Telephony, Peggy Chronister; at Pacific Bell, Robert Deward; at Bell Canada Historical, Stephanie Sykes and Nina Bederian-Gardner; at Il­ linois Bell, Rita Lapka; John A. Fleckner at the National Museum of American His­ tory also provided assistance. Thanks to those interviewed for the project: Tom Winburn, Stan Damkroger, George Hawk Hurst, C. Duncan Hutton, Fred Johnson, Charles Morrish, and Frank Pamphilon. Several research assistants contributed to the work: Melanie Archer, John Chan (who conducted the interviews), Steve Derne, Keith Dierkx, Molly Haggard, Barbara Loomis, and Mary Waters. And several read­ ers provided useful comments on prior versions, including Victoria Bonnell, Paul Burstein, Glenn Carroll, Bernard Finn, Robert Garnet, Roland Marchand, Michael Schudson, John Staudenmaier, S.J., Ann Swidler, Joel Tarr, Langdon Winner, and au­ ditors of presentations. None of these colleagues, of course, is responsible for remain­ ing errors.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2901-0002$01.00 32 The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability 33 take those uses (especially of consumer products) for granted, as if they were straightforwardly derived from the nature of the technol­ ogy or dictated by its creators.1 In the case of the telephone, the initial uses suggested by its pro­ moters were determined by—in addition to technical and economic considerations—its cultural heritage: specifically, practical uses in common with the telegraph. Subscribers nevertheless persisted in using the telephone for "trivial gossip." In the 1920s, the telephone industry shifted from resisting to endorsing such sociability, respond­ ing, at least partly, to consumers' insistent and innovative uses of the technology for personal conversation. After summarizing tele­ phone history to 1940, this article will describe the changes in the uses that telephone promoters advertised and the changes in their at­ titudes toward sociability; it will then explore explanations for these changes.2 'See C. S. Fischer, "Studying Technology and Social Life," pp. 284-301 in High Tech­ nology, Space, and Society: Emerging Trends, ed. M. Castells (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1985). For a recent example of a study looking at consumers and sales, see M. Rose, "Urban Environments and Technological Innovation: Energy Choices in Denver and Kansas City, 1900-1940," Technology and Culture 25 (July 1984): 503-39. 2The primary sources used here include telephone and advertising industry jour­ nals; internal telephone company reports, correspondence, collections of advertise­ ments, and other documents, primarily from AT&T and Pacific Telephone (PT&T); privately published memoirs and corporate histories; government censuses, investiga­ tions, and research studies; and several interviews, conducted by John Chan, with re­ tired telephone company employees who had worked in marketing. The archives used most are the AT&T Historical Archives, New York (abbreviated hereafter as AT&T ARCH), and the Pioneer Telephone Museum, San...