The People's Telephone: The Politics of Telephony in the United States and Canada, 1876--1926 (2004)
MacDougall, Robert Duncan (Author)
Harvard University
Cohen, Lizabeth
Thernstrom, Stephan
Galison, Peter
Edition Details: Advisors: Cohen, Lizabeth; Stephan Thernstrom; Peter Galison
Physical Details: 418 pp.
Language: English
My dissertation is a comparative and transnational history of the telephone in the Midwestern United States and Central Canada, from the telephone's invention in 1876 to the completion of a nearly ubiquitous continental network in the 1920s. It begins with case studies of the telephone's growth in Muncie, Indiana and Kingston, Ontario, and then steps back to tell a larger regional story. Both nations in these years experienced profound changes in political economy, economic geography, and social structure. The local was challenged by the national, the small by the big, in nearly every area of life. Bound up in this transformation, both cause and result, were new technologies like the telephone. "The People's Telephone" demonstrates the fundamentally political nature of technological systems. The shapes that telephone networks and the telephone industry would take were neither inherent in the technology itself nor determined by the natural selection of the market. At each step of the telephone's construction, politics and technology were inextricable. Telephone networks were creatures of collective action and government regulation. Fierce political debates about the local and the national, competition and monopoly, the size of corporations, and more, were all mapped onto prosaic disputes over the telephone and its wires. The key difference between telephony's development in the United States and Canada was not the presence or absence of state intervention. In both countries, lines between public and private enterprise in telephony were indistinct. What mattered more for the development of telephony in the United States and Canada were differing approaches and attitudes towards localism and centralization. A nationalist mission for the telephone helped preserve the Bell monopoly in Central Canada. Localism and hostility to national integration fuelled opposition to Bell in the Midwestern United States. But outcomes were ironic. Despite Ottawa's desire to enlist the telephone as an agent of national unity, a quilt of distinct provincial systems emerged. And the telephone fight in the United States ultimately led to a single centrally-controlled telephone network, and a powerful defense of integration and consolidation in general.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/05 (2004): 1932. UMI pub. no. 3131915.
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