ption underneath: "By the wondrous agency
of electricity, speech dashes through space and swift as lightning bears
tidings of good and evil."

But these random guesses as to the future of the telephone may fall far
short of what the reality will be. In these dazzling days it is idle to
predict. The inventor has everywhere put the prophet out of business.
Fact has outrun Fancy. When Morse, for instance, was tacking up his
first little line of wire around the Speedwell Iron Works, who could
have foreseen two hundred and fifty thousand miles of submarine cables,
by which the very oceans are all aquiver with the news of the world?
When Fulton's tiny tea-kettle of a boat steamed up the Hudson to Albany
in two days, who could have foreseen the steel leviathans, one-sixth of
a mile in length, that can in the same time cut the Atlantic Ocean in
halves? And when Bell stood in a dingy workshop in Boston and heard
the clang of a clock-spring come over an electric wire, who could have
foreseen the massive structure of the Bell System, built up by half the
telephones of the world, and by the investment of more actual capital
than has gone to the making of any other industrial association? Who
could have foreseen what the telephone bells have done to ring out the
old ways and to ring in the new; to ring out delay, and isolation and to
ring in the efficiency and the friendliness of a truly united people?

End of Project Gutenberg's The History of the Telephone, by Herbert N. Casson

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