to strangers, and so forth.

This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective anonymity
seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.

This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to the USA; from
the beginning, the same was true of the British phone system. An early
British commentator kindly remarked: "No doubt boys in their teens
found the work not a little irksome, and it is also highly probable
that under the early conditions of employment the adventurous and
inquisitive spirits of which the average healthy boy of that age is
possessed, were not always conducive to the best attention being given
to the wants of the telephone subscribers."

So the boys were flung off the system--or at least, deprived of control
of the switchboard. But the "adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of
the teenage boys would be heard from in the world of telephony, again
and again.

The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death: "the Dog,"
dead tech. The telephone has so far avoided this fate. On the
contrary, it is thriving, still spreading, still evolving, and at
increasing speed.

The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a technological
artifact: it has become a HOUSEHOLD OBJECT. The telephone, like the
clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen utensils and running water, has
become a technology that is visible only by its absence. The telephone
is technologically transparent. The global telephone system is the
largest and most complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use.
More remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely physically safe
for the user.

For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone was weirder, more
shocking, more "high-tech" and harder to comprehend, than the most
outrageous stunts of advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.
In trying to understand what is happening to us today, with our
bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiber-optic
transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and a vivid tangle of
new laws and new crimes, it is important to realize that our society
has been through a similar challenge before--and that, all in all, we
did rather well by it.

Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But the sensations of
weirdness vanished quickly, once people began to hear the familiar
voices of relatives and friends, in their own homes on their own
telephones. The telephone changed from a fearsome high-te