99. Telephones

            All Americans should be grateful for the telephone. Most of us now carry one in our pockets, no longer relying upon wires to connect us. But we also know that that is not how it started. Our initial connections were very dependent upon wires, little boxes and our voices. It was a step beyond the telegraph which was another step beyond the mail that had been our primary distance communication since ancient times.

            Now here we are in the twenty first century communicating with one another over vast distances with little pocket computers that we even use to broadcast our visual forms to others far away. Now we have combined our desktop computers, our televisions, our cameras, our radios, and that ancient mail system into that little pocket computer. And we tie all that together with our discoveries of radio waves and satellites so that we don’t even have to bother with connecting wires. Harry Potter’s wand has nothing over our cell phones!

            Of course, the phone part all started with our good friend Alexander Graham Bell, that very American of inventors. He’s the one who gave us the telephone. Obviously our little cell phone-computer-radio combinations were a collection of other inventions that we now carry around in our pockets. Most of it really is a conglomeration of American ideas, but the telephone is the basis of that little pocket computer and I’m quite glad to have one. It’s a nice step forward from the eight party land line I remember as a kid, but then I probably would not waste my money on a cell phone where I grew up in the Salmon River Canyon. They don’t get much in the way of cell service there. But, thank you very much, Mr. Bell, even there the telephone is still available and because of those wires so are computers and the internet. The telephone is, in fact, a great American invention that I am quite happy to use and I am thankful that it is available to me and a part of my American heritage.