From the Telephone to Modern Computing | James Gleick

Sonal Chokshi: People always dreamed of being able to communicate across long distances, but there was no practical way to do that until the telegraph arrived.

Robert Hackett: I wonder how the world would be different if Bell and his team had not been awarded the patent for the phone.

Sonal Chokshi: That patent was ridiculous. There was literally bribery involved.

Robert Hackett: The telephone was a technology that was defined by its users, not by the people who made it and sold it.

Sonal Chokshi: The first industrial revolution is driven by machines. Second industrial revolution driven by electricity. The third industrial revolution, which some people would call the information age. Some would argue we're now entering a fourth age. What might you call that?

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Sonal Chokshi: Today's episode comes from our recommended listening series, featuring standout conversations from across our broader network. This one comes from the A16Z from Tear Show, where Sonal Choksi and Robert Hackett sit down with author James Glick to ask about what the history of the telephone can teach us about transformative technologies. They discuss the original network effects, bottom-up innovation, Bell Labs, and why James sees AI not as a new industrial revolution, but as a continuation of the digital one. It's a story about how technologies evolve in ways even their inventors can't anticipate.

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Sonal Chokshi: Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the A6NZ Frontier Show. I am so excited to have as our very special guest today, someone that we are huge fans of, James Glick, who is the author of a new book called *The Telephone: A New History*. Robert and I are co-hosting this episode, and both of us are huge fans of his writings. In fact, I think we were both bonding over *Chaos*, which actually is a book that captivated me as a child. I remember just being like, wow, it opened up a whole new world of science, writing, and journalism that I didn't even know was possible back then. James has also written books on Feynman, *Genius*, Isaac Newton, *Time Travel*, and much more.

This new book is a history of America's first modern world-rearranging technology. Not even the inventors realized what it was good for and how ubiquitous it would become. The phone would prove less an invention and more a continuous revolution. It would create a profession, enable the skyscraper, world war, the assembly line, and the multinational corporation. And then, of course, there's the science that Bell Labs created around the telephone. So this is a very rich book, and I think we'll just jump right into it by talking about the telephone as a device, kind of a network, and then more broadly, the innovation process and backstory. So James, ahoy.

James Gleick: Ahoy. [Laughs] Got to start off that way with Alexander Graham Bell's preferred method of greeting.

Robert Hackett: I thought we could start here, which is about the nature of invention and how so often we are fed this fairy tale version of the lone genius having some eureka moment and then an idea springing fully formed from their head into the world. One thing I love about your book is how it adds complexity and nuance to that story, especially in the case of the telephone. I think many people are familiar from their time in grade school learning that Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone. He picked up the two receivers with wire strung between them. He asked Watson to come hither or if he was there. And then we're off to the races after that. But that's not actually what happened. It's more interesting, more complex than that. There was prior precedent. There were competing claims to the invention. So I thought maybe you could just describe some of what you found when you looked into this, in doing this archaeology, this excavation of telephony.

James Gleick: It's true. We know a world where sending your voice long distances is completely unremarkable. I mean, we're using a telephone right now. We're very far apart geographically. We are speaking and creating sound waves in the room, and the sound waves are being converted into electricity and almost instantaneously you are hearing what I'm saying because the electricity is reconverted into sound waves at your end. That is the telephone idea. And it didn't exist. People always dreamed of being able to communicate across long distances, but there was no practical way to do that until the telegraph arrived.

The telegraph, in the time of which we speak, was rapidly transforming the world. Everybody understood how important it was. It was making a lot of money. Wires were crisscrossing the United States. People were sending messages electrically. So that was fantastic. It was natural when the telephone started to arrive to think of it as a kind of extension of the telegraph. Something new. It was the telegraph, but you add voice. A lot of people made that mistake, including the president of Western Union, which had something close to a telegraph monopoly, who was offered the first patent for the telephone and said, "That's just a toy. What use could I possibly make of that?"

Part of the reason for the prejudice was that the telegraph was already a business device. It was used by businesses. Nobody had a telegraph in their home except the very rich. To use a telegraph, you had to have specialized knowledge. You had to literally learn a code. Instead, people would go to the telegraph office in their town or village and write a message on a piece of paper. The telephone was completely different. People weren't immediately ready to understand how it might be used. The first thing people thought of was, if I could have this device in my house that I can pick up and sound arrives, I would love to put the other device in the concert hall so I could listen to music. Radio before its time, because there was no radio until a generation later.

Robert Hackett: It's funny because this is exactly what Thomas Edison thought the first uses of the phonograph were going to be. He was like, "Oh, people are going to love to hear the sermons. They're going to love to hear concerts." But it ended up being rock music and jazz that caught on, much to his surprise.

James Gleick: Well, who knows what Edison's musical taste would have been like if he were alive today.

Robert Hackett: That's true.

James Gleick: The phonograph came along right after the telephone. It was hard on its heels, and that's not an accident because everybody was figuring out how to make connections between electricity and sound. It was a kind of technological Wild West. In the United States especially, in places like Boston where the famous Alexander Bell had just washed up, there were workshops where people could tinker. People were inventing burglar alarms to use electricity and all kinds of new gizmos. You didn't have to invest a lot of money and nobody knew what was going to be good for what. That was the environment in which young Alexander Graham Bell found himself. He started tinkering. He didn't actually know anything about electricity. He was, by profession, a young teacher of deaf children.

Bell didn't exactly know at first what he was making, and he told his investors that it was going to be a kind of improved telegraph. But he had competition too. Robert alluded to this already. Bell was not alone. Twenty years before, there had been a German, completely unbeknownst to any American, named Philip Reis, who in Frankfurt, because he was a school teacher with access to electrical stuff, batteries and wires, used membranes based on animal parts. He, too, had this insight that you could make a connection between sound waves in the air and electricity, whatever electricity was. To most people, it was still an enormous mystery.

Robert Hackett: I've got to say, the German man in Frankfurt using sausage casings to make this device is just like, you couldn't make this stuff up. It's just too rich.

James Gleick: Yeah. One of the pictures that sticks in my head from Philip Reis's experience was that he actually did build a working gadget. There was a point in time when this gadget was available for sale at a kind of electrical curiosity shop in Germany. You could have walked in and bought it, but there was only one. Nobody thought, "Well, what can you do with one telephone? You need to have many telephones and then everybody can talk to everybody else." That is so fundamental and obvious that it seems it wouldn't need to be explained, but it wasn't obvious at the time. It's really one reason that Bell in the end, even though he wasn't the only inventor and he wasn't the first inventor of what we now call a telephone, does, in my view, deserve credit because he did, unlike the other inventors, understand right from the beginning, because he was interested in speech and in conversation, that that was what the telephone could be used for.

Sonal Chokshi: It's the network effect. We talk a lot about network effects in our business, and there are many definitions, and the definitions are evolving. But the definition of a network effect is a network becoming more useful the more users there are. So to your point, James, that is exactly the insight that Bell had. You needed multiple touch points in that network in order for it to become valuable for everyone using it. So that's exactly the beginning of that concept.

James Gleick: Yeah, that's right, Sonal. I know how important network effects are in our world. It's true that the telephone was the demonstrator of the first network effect. Bell wasn't thinking in exactly those terms, in terms of adding value for a business. But very quickly, the telephone companies that sprung up and the one telephone company that bears his name did recognize that. They started to use it in their advertising. They realized that every new subscriber they could sign up added value for all the other subscribers. If you've got a telephone in your house and there are only 100 people connected to your network, that's one thing. But if you make it 1,000 people, that is more than 10 times as valuable. It's exponentially more valuable.

Robert Hackett: I think the other thing I would call out on what you write about in your book, when you were describing the difference between the telegraph and the telephone and why Western Union dismissed it as a toy. I loved what you wrote in the book, that the mistake was thinking of the telephone as an improved telegraph. It was a new species altogether. The telegraph required skilled operators in office, presumed literacy, and depended on the written word. But this is the best part that you follow with. At the same time, the telegraph offered no scope for prolixity or garrulousness, nor did the telegraph allow for spontaneity. People did not blurt, stammer, or hem and haw by way of the telegraph. Jokes could seldom survive translation into Morse code. On the telephone, jokes were fine. So it's kind of the original social network.

James Gleick: Absolutely. The proprietors of the telegraph thought that was a good thing. They didn't want people using their expensive and valuable device for frivolous purposes like telling jokes. It didn't bother them that it required expertise and that it was specialized and that it served businesses more than individuals because they thought businesses was where the money was. They were profoundly wrong, but they weren't idiotic.

The telephone had an immediate drawback compared to the telegraph, which was there was no written record. With the telegraph, the messages were there. You could see them. They were at both ends and they were preserved. For legal purposes, you could consult the record. With the telephone, everything is ephemeral because the human voice is ephemeral. Our conversation now is being recorded for future use, but in those days, conversations were not recorded. When Edison did invent the phonograph, the first thing he thought was, "This will perfect the telephone." Now you can attach a phonograph, a recording device to your telephone, and you will have a permanent record. He thought that's what the telephone needed, and now it'll finally be valuable.

Robert Hackett: Interesting.

James Gleick: That's not a stupid idea. It's hard to explain why he was so wrong about that because we do now have answering machines and transcribing technology and all of that stuff is useful. But it turns out it wasn't the important thing about the telephone in its early days. The important thing was the very thing that made it seem unbusinesslike: that it was spontaneous, that anybody could use it, that it was casual. You just picked it up and you talked.

Sonal Chokshi: So often ephemerality is a feature. You can see with social media today, it is actually valuable to not have a permanent record of yourself on the internet. You might want communications that can expire. So maybe one quick thing you could answer for us, and then we want to switch into talking more about this concept of networks. It was very interesting that people didn't know what the use cases for the telephone were, and that even AT&T had to get help from Doug Fairbanks making a video to create an instruction manual for how to even use a telephone. What are your thoughts, being a historian and a chronicler, or I love how Robert described you as an excavator and archaeologist of technology, on how the telephone use cases evolved?

James Gleick: Sonal, you're getting at something that's really interesting and incredibly important, and I'm sure you can think of a lot of examples in current technology of this happening. The telephone was a technology that was defined by its users, not by the people who made it and sold it. The users themselves had all kinds of misconceptions at first of what it might be good for. But in the long run, it was the users who decided how they were going to use it. I discovered so many individual stories of people accidentally using the telephone in ways that the manufacturers hadn't necessarily anticipated, and they couldn't be stopped.

You are a farm wife on the American prairie in the late 19th century. You are one of the most isolated creatures on earth because your farmhouse is a mile away from the nearest farmhouse and your husband is out plowing the fields. When he's done plowing the fields, he at least has the ability to go into town and hang out at the tavern. But you are not allowed to do that. You've got nobody to talk to morning till night. Then suddenly telephones start spreading. At first, the telephones were not being sold to farmers because the Bell companies were in the big cities and did not see the farmers as a strong potential market. But within 10 or 20 years of the invention of the phone, it was a pretty easy thing to make and you could cobble it together from parts. What they used for wire was the barbed wire that was already there fencing in the plains.

Sonal Chokshi: This is one of my absolute favorite parts of the book. It's so great, the stories.

James Gleick: Yeah, mine too, for so many reasons. For one thing, the barbed wire was such a mixed blessing. It was closing off what had previously been common land. On the other hand, there it was ready to conduct electricity when you could just attach your gizmo and a little bit more wire to bring it into the house. At the other end, somebody's doing the same thing. Before you know it, you've got little clusters of farmhouses that are connected one to the other. They can't dial. There's no such thing yet as a switchboard, but they can pick up the phone and maybe somebody a few houses down is going to also pick up the phone, or they can make it ring, and they can start to have a conversation. What they talk about, how they use it, the information they exchange, that is entirely up to them.

Sonal Chokshi: The well of irony in history is so rich and deep. Here on the one hand, you have this other invention, the devil's rope designed to cut off things, to close them out. That's where the boundary. Cord them in, separate. And then it becomes the thing that connects people out there. It's just like...

James Gleick: Devil's rope. That's very good.

Robert Hackett: To give a related example, Mark Twain, as you know from my book, was one of the early adopters of the telephone. He was a gadget guy before his time. Living in Hartford, Connecticut, he was very proud of being the first person in his neighborhood to have a telephone, the first person in the city to have his own telephone at home. He was also kind of a curmudgeon. He wrote a very early short story for *The Atlantic*. You can see that what's happening is he's just sitting there and listening to his wife on the phone. The point of his story is that it's an amusing experience for the guy to hear just one end of a telephone conversation. This, too, is something new in the world, one half of a telephone conversation.

Mark Twain starts writing this down and taking notes. He's just writing down the part of the conversation that he's hearing. He's completely patronizing to his wife and her friend at the other end of the line, kind of making fun of them. They're talking about sewing, the Bible, music. The conversation as he makes notes on it seems completely aimless. He's mocking them as being a little bit flighty and purposeless. But I hear something completely different in that. What I hear is women who were cut off from one another, who had no easy way to exchange knowledge on these many subjects — sewing, the Bible, music — to chat with other women and to say what they knew, suddenly had a channel to do that.

Sonal Chokshi: Oh, that's wonderful.

Robert Hackett: One of my favorite themes in the book is this contrast between centralization and decentralization. Networks coming from the top-down versus bottoms-up from a grassroots perspective. AT&T and Bell being the monopoly is the perfect encapsulation of the top-down idea. But then you have all these wild fringe experiments taking place across the rural expanse of America, with farmers jerry-rigging their own telecommunications networks out of the literal garbage that they have on hand and their fencing. You get this amazing contrast between things happening top-down and bottoms-up. That's by far one of my favorite parts in this book. I'd love to linger on this theme for a little bit and ask a few questions about it.

I want to ask you this sort of impossible question, James. I wonder how the world would be different if Bell and his team had not been awarded the patent for the phone. It led to a centralized network, a monopoly, a corporate monopoly that had tremendous power over the course of the 20th century. Did it have to play out that way? I know it's impossible to answer a counterfactual, but I just wonder how much path dependency there is in history and what resulted versus the alternatives that could have been.

James Gleick: Are you asking, did it have to be a monopoly? Did the telephone business have to be a monopoly?

Robert Hackett: Yes, that's part of it.

James Gleick: The people at AT&T would say it is a natural monopoly. That was their argument. They said, "Of course the telephone has to be a monopoly. It's so much more efficient that way. If you let everybody have their own telephone company, you've got problems of interconnection." There was some truth to that because for many years, for several decades, there were competing telephone companies. There was an independent telephone movement. People hated the city-based, financier-financed Bell monopoly and preferred a grassroots telephone movement. There were all kinds of inefficiencies in that. I think that's kind of what you're asking, Robert, is do you need something like a monopoly to create a more efficient system?

Robert Hackett: Yeah, I'd say so. Just to add another cut at this, one thing that I find fascinating is the invalidation of the ENIAC patent on the digital computer. The first digital computer. That happened in the 70s. There was a big fight, Sperry Rand versus Honeywell, over whether the digital computer — the first one, ENIAC, or I'm saying quote-unquote first one because that was the whole premise of the battle — whether it could be patented and by whom. It was invalidated, and it allowed all these other manufacturers to start making computers. It created a very different environment. So I wonder, going back to the start of the telephone, if those patents hadn't been upheld in the same way, would we have gotten a different outcome?

James Gleick: First of all, by right, that patent was ridiculous. I say it was ridiculous. It had several components. There are the aspects of the patent that have to do with making an electrical device. In fact, Bell hadn't even made his electrical device at the time he got the patent. But Bell did have an idea which had to do with the conversion of sound waves into an electrical signal, and in particular, a continuous electrical signal in contrast to the discrete dots and dashes electrical signal of the telegraph. That was a genuine insight on his part, but he wasn't the first or the only person to have that insight. There were actual scientists, particularly in England — Faraday and Maxwell — who actually understood the science of that in profound ways that Bell did not. Yet in the United States, Bell got a patent for that idea. His lawyers managed to get that patent extended to apply to anyone who created a telephone, even though Bell had not been the first person to make a telephone and hadn't been the first person to have that idea. There was literally bribery involved. The almost comical story of the particular patent examiner who was kind of a drunk, who was played by Bell's fancy lawyers. That patent shouldn't have been allowed to serve as the foundation for a large monopoly.

That leaves open the question that I think you're asking, Robert, which is wouldn't it have drifted in the direction of monopoly anyway because that's the natural way to organize a telephone network in a big country like the United States? I don't think the finances of it had to work out the way they did, with the money flowing to a few very rich people. In the end, it was mainly J.P. Morgan who made it happen and took control behind the scenes and insisted on consolidating the Bell System's monopoly. Yet it has to be said that for generations, for more than 50 years in the United States, people took the AT&T monopoly pretty much for granted. At first there was tremendous anger about it and tremendous controversy, but it became a fact of life. Widows and orphans owned AT&T stock, stock symbol T. Government regulation ostensibly kept prices reasonable, but also guaranteed that the telephone system would have a profit. That led to some good things. It led to Bell Labs, for example.

Sonal Chokshi: Right, exactly. But I guess it sounds like what you're saying to net out on Robert's question, which is really getting at, did the monopoly have to happen? It sounds like you didn't love that it had to play out with the capital and the finances, the way J.P. Morgan consolidated and organized it. But it probably did need that level of coordination to happen in order for the technology to take off? Or where do you really net out on this question?

James Gleick: No, I guess I don't think that. The technology took off. We could see the technology spreading all across the country out of control of the Bell company. We're talking now specifically about the 1880s and 1890s when the Bell Company was headquartered first in Boston and then in New York and growing larger and larger. Still, it didn't control anything like a majority of the telephones in the United States. People were spontaneously creating their own telephones. Like the farmers example. Companies. Some of them played by the rules that the Bell system was attempting to establish and licensed the patent from the Bell company and became part of the system. Some of them didn't. Some of them went rogue. Technologically speaking, that worked just as well. It just had different owners.

What was going to be necessary was some kind of coordination and some kind of consolidation. We needed all the different telephone companies and individual subnetworks to link up into a single national system. In the history of the telephone, as it really happened, that involved the vision of the people who ran the Bell system, who took charge of that and were committed to creating a national system and did a lot of publicity, a lot of public relations around the idea of one company, one system. But there's no reason it required centralized control for the one system to come into being.

Sonal Chokshi: I think one of the most interesting things on that anecdote is that it feels like every technology revolution I've ever seen, inevitably, the one dominant monopoly will never stay the dominant monopoly. There's always something to take them down. Even though in this case, yes, the government did break them up. There's an anecdote you talk about in the book where the then head of AT&T was actually a little relieved because they were boxed out of playing in the information revolution, entering digital computing because they were defined as a common carrier back then. So they couldn't get into that game.

The second anecdote that I think is really interesting is that we talk about how big AT&T was. Today, they don't even come up that way anymore. One of the things that made me kind of sad reading your book, honestly, was, wow, this was a really dominant narrative at one time in human history. You walk away with a little bit of nostalgia and sadness that that time, that company, it's not the same anymore. Everything has changed very drastically since then. So anyway, I just want to point that out because I thought that was one of the lingering feelings you get when you read the book and walk away from it.

James Gleick: So are you saying that you feel it's just natural in the life cycle of a monopoly that it's in the end going to break apart?

Sonal Chokshi: I don't want to prescribe how it happens because there are many different patterns that have played out in innovation history. But it's inevitable that whatever is dominant at one point will not remain dominant because something better edges in and will break it up.

James Gleick: Whether or not it's inevitable, you can certainly see that in the Bell System story. They did become complacent. They became stagnant. One of the first indications of that was that people tried to attach stuff to their telephone equipment. They tried to extend the network themselves. Some of the gizmos they started to attach seem incredibly harmless and not particularly potent. Like there was some gadget that was going to make it possible to create a kind of cone of silence around your telephone conversation.

Robert Hackett: The hush device.

James Gleick: Yes, that's right. You'd think if you were the manager of the Bell system, you might say, "Well, what's the harm?" But they got very defensive and started trying to get it. The principle of it, hands off. They thought it was going to be like a virus invading their system. Then some of the stuff that people started to attach to the system actually was far more potent. When radio technology enabled wireless communication from smaller and smaller devices like walkie-talkies, it was natural for people to think, "Why am I tethered to the wall every time I want to have a telephone conversation?"

James Gleick: Why can I hook up a gadget here that will convert this telephone conversation into a radio signal that I can hear in my truck out on the farm? And the Bell people fought that too. And then, of course, when what later became MCI realized that they could send long distance signals far more cheaply using microwave towers than the Bell system was using their copper wires, Bell didn't want any part of that. They wanted to shut that down. That was the classic monopolist behavior that antitrust laws are designed to fight. And it was, in the end, the undoing of the Bell system.

Robert Hackett: Yeah, we might frame it as a difference between a closed network and an open network, because we're open source maxis here. The more open source things are, the more you can allow people to do things and create value actually for everyone, if you're doing it well. It strikes me as kind of funny that AT&T was so like, "Hands off, don't mess with our device." And then what could be viewed as the number one phone company of today, Apple, is similarly extremely restrictive about what you can do on their devices. I don't know why that is. What about phones makes people so... possessive? Want to lock down their control so much.

Sonal Chokshi: I don't know if it's just phones. Just to kind of recap where we are so far. We've talked about the process of the invention. We've talked about the use cases. We've talked a little bit about this tension that Robert pointed out between decentralization and centralization, this bottom up, top down. Going back to your story about the farmers and the hijacking of these copper wires, barbed wire. It's a great example of how a lot of times these systems initially don't serve the edges of a network. Back in the day, they would have called it the last mile. And we saw that revolution play out with mobile phones, where there was an entire country, in the case of China, even India, that was mobile native and mobile first. The installation of the technology did not spread at an infrastructural level. They essentially leapfrogged without that technology and went right into using mobile phones, creating a whole mobile economy at the edges of a network in a very empowered way. I think that's another interesting example of this tension between what happens at the edges of a network and the center of a network. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, if you've been watching that phenomenon.

James Gleick: Yeah, I absolutely agree. That was very much the story in Africa. Which of all the continents was the one that had the least wired infrastructure and had really lagged behind much of the world. When mobile phones arrived, they were so transformational. People were able to adopt them in some ways much more quickly than they were able to adopt them in countries that had wired networks in place and resistance from the wire telephone companies.

Sonal Chokshi: Exactly. And I love that narrative. It's a good segue to this next theme that we wanted to talk to you about. You talk in your book about how the telephone later on became not just a way to connect humans, but a communications pipeline between humans and machines. All of us are old enough to remember the early days of dial-up and that beep, beep, beep sound. [laughs] I'm not doing a very good job of the sound effect. But the sound of dial-up over phone to get internet. You remember in the early days of voice over IP, where voice would be signaled over these digital wires. It was really interesting to me in your book that you talked about how the idea of computers talking to other computers across telephone wires seemed esoteric. But the FCC decided it needed attention. So they launched the Computer Inquiry, the first of three, you say, to find out whether data transmission should be regulated as a form of telephone service or something altogether different. They defined the distinction between peer communications as messages being transmitted versus data processing in which computers manipulated, enhanced, and rearranged the information. That was where the common carrier rules and things came about in the early 70s. I would love you to just comment on what you thought the impact of that decision was and if there's anything interesting on that note.

James Gleick: In our digital world, we forget how analog the original telephone technology was and what that meant as a practical matter. I'm old enough to remember a blackout in New York City when I was a kid, an electrical blackout. The lights go out. You look out the window. The streetlights are out. The traffic lights are out. Everybody is in darkness. My parents are getting out the candles and the flashlights. And to my utter amazement, as a child, you could still pick up the telephone, hear a dial tone, and place a call. The telephone network was not electrical. I mean, of course it was electrical, but it was generating its own electricity. The first telephones, the electricity that was generated was generated by the mouthpiece of the phone. It was a tiny amount of current compared to the current you need for an electric light. Yet it was persistent enough and stable enough to enable a telephone call across long distances. The signals were just analog. If you wanted to dial a number, that is a kind of naturally digital piece of information, a seven digit telephone number. But they had to do it with clicks. The dial sent audible clicks down the line. What was necessary for the world to transform into the thing it is today was for there to be a convergence between the new digital electronic domain that involved computing machinery and all kinds of other digital electronic stuff, and this analog world that ruled the telephone lines.

Sonal Chokshi: Well, this goes to talking about Bell Labs and why they came about. You talk about in the book, there's a whole chapter devoted to them. They existed to help fix signal feedback, cryptography, vacuum tubes, transistor integrated circuits. All of these things are precisely because, tell me if I'm wrong, but this is what I took away from the book, because of that convergence you're describing. They had to figure out how to make these things connect, clean up, do more. Is that the right link?

James Gleick: It's certainly right to say that that's where the science came from. But it wasn't purposeful in the sense that they set out to drive the world in that direction. What was unique about Bell Labs, what was so wonderful about it, was that it became very quickly the largest, most expensive, best-staffed corporate research lab in the world. It rivaled universities. Beyond that, as a kind of accidental benign effect of the Bell system having a monopoly, it didn't care that much about profit. Its primary mission was to create technologies that would be useful in improving the company's networks and transmission lines and devices. There was tons of science that did that. But the company was also filled with people who were given free reign because it was felt by their managers that if they let these smart scientists tinker and follow their noses, good things would happen. In fact, good things did happen. Bell Laboratories was responsible for an astonishing number of Nobel Prizes. I think it's fair to say that there's no corporate research lab today that gives its researchers as much freedom and as little requirement to contribute directly to the bottom line as Bell Labs did during its heyday.

Sonal Chokshi: Yeah. And that was why Bell Labs was the company that was able to invent the transistor. I would add to this. I'm a student of this because I worked at Xerox PARC. Similarly, that's also a place that invented a lot of iconic technologies: Ethernet, blue lasers. The list is endless. They're famous for the graphical user interface. But there's a list of at least 30 to 40 inventions that are widely used in our world today, very similar to Bell Labs. A lot of people ask me what was really unique about these setups that made them work. You mentioned two of them, James. One is it was well-funded. Two, you put smart people together in a room. But I would add a third. You actually allude to this a little bit in your book. One is the idea of not just physics for physics' sake, but applied. It's still oriented in the world of application. That's very different than what university labs could do. The other that I often tell people, it wasn't just a bunch of smart people going around. To your point in the book, yes, they were coming up with these things as they needed, but they were still framed within the goal of helping the overall mission of the Bell system. It wasn't just random. Similarly, Xerox PARC had the mission of "invent the office of the future." Having that kind of guiding mission and guidepost is what you need. A lot of times people mistakenly assume that you just put a bunch of smart people in a room and give them capital, but then they don't actually invent all those things. Both of these institutions invented many, many things. They were not one-hit wonders. They invented thousands of things that people use daily. I just wanted to make that note because I do think the Bell Labs chapter is very interesting, and it was very interesting to me personally.

Robert Hackett: By the way, Xerox loved "The Office of the Future" until they actually saw it, and then they were like, "Bury this thing." Nobody's going to need to print anything anymore.

James Gleick: In a way, the iconic example of a mathematician who was just allowed to follow his nose was Claude Shannon. He's the personification of this. The creator of information theory. He was a guy who was allowed to hide away in his cubicle. His managers weren't really paying a lot of attention to what he did. And you're absolutely right, Sonal, that the context in which he was working was a company that was selling telecommunications and sending signals down wires. But in his mind, when he created his mathematical theory of communication, there was nothing that was going to contribute to the company bottom line. His bosses weren't asking him to. It didn't really contribute to the Bell System's bottom line. But as a milestone in pure science, as a collection of theory and a collection of mathematical tools, it contributed to everybody's bottom line.

Sonal Chokshi: That's right. And I love in your book how you describe Claude Shannon's contributions. You describe how Shannon made a bridge between information and uncertainty, between information and entropy, and between information and chaos. The fundamental unit of information needed a name, and he offered one: the bit, a blunt monosyllable short for binary digit. Then you go on to explain the importance of that invention in the book. But what's really interesting to me is, yes, he wasn't asked to directly contribute to the bottom line. But that framing that you shared in your book, between information and uncertainty, information and entropy, information and chaos, that's precisely what I mean about being set upon a big mission or a big problem, but not constrained or prescribed to build a specific product. He was still exploring the space of how do you connect analog and digital? How do you connect information?

James Gleick: One of the fascinating things to me was that when Shannon first made the most profound contributions to connecting the analog and the digital, which led to the modems whose squeal you have just so effectively imitated, the problem he was trying to solve at that moment was how to create a secure communications line during World War II between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of England, Winston Churchill. That required rooms full of equipment. Because it needed cryptography, the signals had to be digitized. The signals were analog because they were telephone signals. They didn't expect Churchill and Roosevelt to start typing to each other. They weren't sending each other email because that didn't exist. They were going to have an oral telephone conversation, and it had to be encrypted. To encrypt it, it had to be digitized, which was an incredibly hard problem in the early 1940s.

Sonal Chokshi: You described how Michael Faraday had discovered some of the technologies decades before and that James Maxwell had explained it mathematically. Then you wrote, quote, "The science was beyond anything that Bell, the person, understood. But the physicists were not trying to make things the way American electricians were. News between Europe and America traveled slowly by way of handwritten letters carried on ships." So there was essentially an information lag in sharing information. I'm more interested in the broader questions of how innovations play out throughout history and how they evolve. I don't know if you've read the book by Joel Mokyr, who won the Nobel Prize last year. He describes a republic of letters where scientists would communicate with each other in essentially an open network of sharing, pre-journal publishing, to share their ideas. I think the thing that I'm most fascinated by is what I informally call the "scenius of genius." What is the scene around inventors and inventions that makes things happen? What you describe is a period where people are so hungry to build things and there's so much energy, electric, no pun intended, where people are building things. But then there's a slow communication where information doesn't travel so fast. That's one of the things that allowed Bell to essentially get the patent that he did in the United States to help build telephone networks. What else do you think was very interesting about that time when it came to that broader scenius, that scene setting with all these creators and inventors, that you were struck by when you were writing this book?

James Gleick: I was fascinated by exactly what you're talking about. By the difference in not just the lack of communication, but the difference in goals, the different kinds of motivation that we see in this early electrical era. The scientists were almost entirely in Europe at that point. Physical science in the United States was very primitive and depended so much on the slow ship-bound mail from Europe. But the United States was full of tinkerers. Part of the national character that was developing very self-consciously and proudly in 19th century America was this idea that we can invent things. We're pioneers. We cobble things together and let's see if they work. For telephone technology, it turns out that's what was needed. Nobody in England, where they had the greatest electrical physicists, was motivated to try to build a telephone.

Sonal Chokshi: Yes, I love that. You describe in your book the Centennial Exhibition, which I think is so interesting because we're in the 250th year this year of the United States and that was the 100th year. There are rooms full of people just hungrily building things everywhere you can imagine. I think that's so fascinating. You basically talk about how the closing decades of the 19th century in hindsight were a second industrial revolution. In the book, you describe the first industrial revolution as driven by machines, steam-powered, coal-fueled, transforming economies, mechanized manufacture, agriculture, transportation. The second industrial revolution is driven by electricity, electric power, electric lighting, and above all, electric communication. Then the rapid exchange of information across distances, which enabled standardization, interchangeable parts, and mass production. Then we had the third industrial revolution, which some people would call the information age. Some would argue we're now entering a fourth age. What might you call that? I don't mean to put you on the spot, but do you agree it's a fourth revolution? And what might you call this age?

James Gleick: When you say a fourth revolution, are you talking about AI?

Sonal Chokshi: Yeah.

James Gleick: Actually, I don't agree.

Sonal Chokshi: Oh, interesting.

James Gleick: I don't see a discontinuity between the digital revolution that we've been a part of for, depending on how you measure, 30, 40, or 50 years, and these new technologies of AI. Computers are continuing to get more powerful. They're continuing to solve harder and harder problems. When computers were first thrown at the problem of playing chess, a lot of people thought that's never going to happen. A computer is never going to be able to play a complicated game full of abstractions like chess. Now that we can look at it in the rearview mirror, to us, chess is a trivial problem for a computer to solve. Go is a more interesting game for computers to play. The card game of Bridge is an even more interesting game because it involves elements of language and communication and partnership, and it hasn't been completely solved by computers. My point is computers are solving harder and harder problems. They're getting more and more powerful and they have more and more data available to them. A moment came in the tech community when people started talking about the singularity. Singularity, by definition, being a breaking point, a discontinuity in history. A lot of people have been saying either that the singularity has now come or that the singularity is inevitably six months away. If you define the singularity as the moment when our machines are finally going to become conscious and smarter than us and leave us in the dust, and if we're unlucky, exterminate us along the way. I personally don't believe in any of that stuff. I think what we're seeing is a natural continuation of the evolution of the digital world. Our computers are getting more powerful. They're communicating better. There are negatives to it as there are to every new technology. They're getting better at impersonating people and they're being misused to trick people into thinking that they are entities that it's useful to converse with. But the technologies of AI are going to be very useful, are becoming useful already. They're going to save some people money. In some cases, maybe not work as well as they are expected to work. But no, I don't see it as being a discontinuity.

Sonal Chokshi: I don't know, Robert, where do you nut out on this one?

Robert Hackett: There was a book written about this called *The Control Revolution* that I really love. Sort of a niche academic book, but it describes the long arc of what is happening, the digital transformation, as extending back to the first revolution that you were talking about with machines. Hardware and software share similarities. I think Steve Jobs once said that software is just like hardware that hasn't yet been instantiated into physical form. But yeah, I see this as all very contiguous.

Sonal Chokshi: It's funny, I feel like you guys could convince me of that, but I think the one thing I might argue here is that it becomes a difference not of degree but of kind. You have so much of this continuity, it almost breaks off into its own thing. I might argue that something post-AGI, post-general intelligence, could be that fourth revolution. But I don't know the answer for sure. I'm really glad that I got to ask both of you about that.

Robert Hackett: Well, you can point to the scaling laws in AI where you need tremendous amounts of data to reach something that has a semblance of...

James Gleick: In the old days of singularity debates, they used to talk about a complexity break as well.

Sonal Chokshi: You do say something interesting in your book. You quote Gerald Stanley Lee, who I don't even know who that is, but it was a quote at the beginning of one of your chapters. It says, "We are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider distances and think in larger figures and become eligible to nobler and wider motives." I think that's kind of the fourth revolution we're talking about right now, even though that quote's from 1911.

James Gleick: I love that too. I suppose even now it's a controversial question whether technology has the power to change who we are, what we are as human beings. We're biological creatures fundamentally. You would think, well, the gadgets, we can use these gadgets or not use them. But the history of the telephone is definitely the history of something that changed the way we think, the way we communicate with one another, the way we live. It changed the pace of human life. You don't have to be a technological fanboy to recognize that technology has an effect on us. Of course. It has effects that are good and bad. The story of the telephone, luckily, had plenty of examples of both the good and the bad.

Sonal Chokshi: Yes, that's wonderful. I've just got to ask James, as somebody who spends most of his time on the page, what it's like to do a podcast after the fact, after your book publishes. How that medium is different for you, whether you actually enjoy it, how it changes things.

James Gleick: Oh, what a great final question. Do I seem to be enjoying it? I hope so.

Sonal Chokshi: I think you're starting to black out here.

James Gleick: Well, the fact that it's getting dark, I'm not responsible for that. Night falls. Electricity exists, however. I could turn the lights on, but it's been a gradual process. No, the truth is I don't really enjoy it. I find it difficult. I love talking to people and this conversation has really been fun. You've been lovely.

Sonal Chokshi: Well, thank you.

James Gleick: I guess writing is a much more solitary thing. If I had to analyze myself, which fortunately I do not, there must be something about the solitary activity that appeals to me too.

Sonal Chokshi: Thank you for breaking out of your shell to come here and share your work with the listeners. You've both been great to talk to, so thank you. You've been wonderful, James. Thank you so much for taking the time. We are so excited about your new book, now out, *The Telephone: A New History*. Thank you so much for taking the time, James.

James Gleick: My pleasure.

[Interview ends. Post-show discussion begins.]

Sonal Chokshi: So anyway, Robert, that was fun. We got to both meet a hero. I know you were saying that you're a huge fan of his writings. I set out to be a science writer. That's what I intended to be. I eventually kind of got into tech writing.

Robert Hackett: Just because there's a lot of tech happening.

Sonal Chokshi: Yes, tech is science.

Robert Hackett: I've been reading James's books my entire life. First one I read was his Isaac Newton biography.

Sonal Chokshi: Oh, interesting. Not *Chaos*, weirdly enough.

Robert Hackett: Well, I was a kid. I'm a little older than you, so I read *Chaos* first. But that's because I was a kid when that came out. Read *Chaos* later, incredible. *The Information*, an amazing book about information theory, which is a great sort of prequel to the telephone book that he's just produced. I've always been fascinated by oddballs, inventors, quirky genius types.

Sonal Chokshi: Oh, I remember you're the one who recommended that Benjamin Labatut book, *When We Cease to Understand the World*, on our reading list. Everyone was passing it around.

Robert Hackett: Yeah, and this is kind of my beat at Fortune too. I was just like, find the weird people doing weird, cool things. That's what I like doing. So I'm always drawn to his works because he's always ferreting out these amazing stories.

Sonal Chokshi: Yeah, I like how you described him. I thought it was wonderful how you described him as sort of this archaeologist, excavator of information. I might add to that because I think about this a lot: what are the writers and the books, science books that I actually like versus don't like? Generally I don't like most science writing. I also, by the way, loved his book *Time Travel* because it talks about the significance and importance of time. That's a theme I love in general. I think what makes it work, because I'm not a big fan of what I would say the Gladwellian style, pop science writing, that just does not appeal to me at all. I prefer the depth of the bare metal expert. But you do need this wonderful storytelling wrapped around it. I think what he does, in addition to this archaeology and excavation, is he helps make sense of the trend. You can see the curation and the thinking he puts into it by how he organizes the book. Even in this book, there are so many chapters that essentially are distilling a massive amount of research he must have done to come up with the right way to cover this topic. He's giving the reader a way to make sense of this theme in a very digestible way. That's what I like about his writing compared to some others.

Robert Hackett: I'd probably put Simon Singh in this category too.

Sonal Chokshi: Oh yeah, he's incredible.

Robert Hackett: *Code Book*, fantastic book.

Sonal Chokshi: Yeah, Liz recommended that as well on one of our reading lists a few years ago, I believe. Cool. And what's so cool too, if you just go back to his chaos theory book and the premise of that, how very simple operations can lead to emergent phenomena that are unexpected.

Robert Hackett: Yes, the butterfly flapping its wings causes a hurricane somewhere else. That's right. This just happens over and over again in history. Some weird thing happens and it completely changes the arc of what's to come for decades and centuries hence. I love that.

Sonal Chokshi: Am I hearing this right? You're actually saying that that exact phenomenon in chaos is how innovation plays out? Or am I putting too much stock in that?

Robert Hackett: No, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Sonal Chokshi: Okay, good, because that's what I love. That to me was the most interesting meta theme in his book. I did get a kick out of some of the quotes. By the way, another one I didn't get to share on air. I've got to come up with the quotes next time. I don't know about you. When I was a kid, I used to keep a quote book of all my favorite quotes. I'm always documenting quotes when I'm reading.

Robert Hackett: That's great. A commonplace book.

Sonal Chokshi: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I do it in my journals and I do it in Notes app now. So here's one. I'm going to see if you can guess who said it. "The whole world will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. The instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared to our present telephone. A man will one day be able to carry one in his vest pocket."

Robert Hackett: Nikola Tesla. Yes. 1926. Did you get that from the book, though?

Robert Hackett: Because I was shocked. I did not know that until I read the book. I did. I did. Yeah. Okay. And 1926. And by the way, very foresighted. Right? Especially because you think about AI today. That's a hundred years ago. But this idea about the world will be converted into a huge brain. Like, hello, AI. I was like, holy shit, that is so cool that the pioneer of radio said this a hundred years ago. That's like insane and very cool.

Sonal Chokshi: That is cool. I think H.G. Wells said something like that, too.

Robert Hackett: Oh.

Sonal Chokshi: Some kind of interesting... I'd have to look up the exact quote, but he said something exactly like that about the global brain of telegraphy and electronic communications. The world brain.

Robert Hackett: Sorry, I just got to interject. Oh, world brain. H.G. Wells, yeah. World brain is a collection of his essays and addresses.

Sonal Chokshi: Anyway. That's awesome. Well, okay, well, to close out then, I guess the last thing I'll say is you and James, you were kind of funny at the beginning of the episodes. I think this is a good note to end on because you're like, "Ahoy." And I don't know if the readers or the watchers of this episode know this, but I think you were alluding to this anecdote he shares in the book about how Bell and Watson had greeted each other saying "ahoy" as if they were at sea. And it's funny because James shares an anecdote in his book about how local telephone companies gave instructions to their subscribers on the etiquette. And they say, you should begin by saying "hello." And so I thought that was... I just wanted to make sure I shared that context to kind of come full circle with how you opened this episode so people know where that was coming from. Thank you.

Robert Hackett: Well, and I also think it's kind of magical because when I think of the beginning of computing, it's saying, "Hello, world." That's sort of the first words the software developer will type into new programs. Imagine if it was "Ahoy, world."

Sonal Chokshi: That was fun, Robert, and I think we've come full circle. Let's do it again.

Robert Hackett: Awesome. Thanks for joining.

Sonal Chokshi: Thanks for listening to this episode of the a16z Podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. Follow us on X @a16z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

[Outro music fades in]

Sonal Chokshi: As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. Please note that a16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures. Thank you.