the American legal system was
certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those caught under
the weight of the collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts
and anomalies.

In order to understand why these weird events occurred, both in the
world of technology and in the world of law, it's not enough to
understand the merely technical problems. We will get to those; but
first and foremost, we must try to understand the telephone, and the
business of telephones, and the community of human beings that
telephones have created.

#

Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do,
like laws and governments do.

The first stage of any technology is the Question Mark, often known as
the "Golden Vaporware" stage. At this early point, the technology is
only a phantom, a mere gleam in the inventor's eye. One such inventor
was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named Alexander Graham
Bell.

Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world. In
1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial
talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin. This
weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden
segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber "lips" and
"cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows into a tin tube, imitating
the lungs, young Alec Bell would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and
"tongue," causing the thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.

Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell "phonautograph" of
1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place
on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass
through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.

By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds--ugly shrieks and
squawks--by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.

Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.

But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, or, the "Goofy
Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's most ambitious gadget yet,
reached this stage on March 10, 1876. On that great day, Alexander
Graham Bell became the first person to transmit intelligible human
speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor Bell,
industriously tinkering in his Boston lab, had spattered his trousers
with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard his cry for help--over
Bell's experimental audio-telegraph.