Time and Distance Overcome
“Of what use is such an invention?” the New York World asked shortly after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone in 1876. The world was not waiting for the telephone.
Bell's financial backers asked him not to work on his new invention because it seemed too dubious an investment. The idea on which the telephone depended - the idea that every home in the country could be connected by a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of ioo feet apart - seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.