Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on June 26, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(3):507-520; doi:10.1093/es/khn056
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Telecommunications
RICHARD R. JOHN is a professor of history and adjunct professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago
Contact information: University of Illinois at Chicago, History Department M/C 198, 913 University Hall, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7109; E-mail: rjohn@uic.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The half-century following the Civil War witnessed an epochal transformation in American telecommunications. In the 1870s, the telegraph network became a spawning ground for a remarkable spate of inventions that included the phonograph and the telephone, and around 1900 the telephone network became the first electrical communications medium that network providers intended to be accessible to the entire population. This transformation was a centerpiece of the still unprecedented burst of inventive activity that economic historians call the Second Industrial Revolution.1
This essay builds on recent historical writing, as well as my own research, to sketch some of the ways in which this transformation was shaped not only by market trends and technological imperatives, but also by governmental institutions and civic ideals. It is intended as a study in the centrality of politics to the making of what is today sometimes called the information infrastructure.2 My thesis can be simply put.