The Telephone

A thrilling history of how we fell in and out of love with a technology that changed not just the world, but changed us.

'Science and technology never seem more exciting than when James Gleick is writing about them'
– Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

'Forces you to see the world with new eyes. Blending expertise with a thrilling narrative . . . I loved it!' – Alice Loxton, author of Eighteen and Eleanor

'Charts our distance-compressing, time-shifting telephonic adventure with exceptional brio and subtlety' – Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

A supernatural instrument bringing voices from afar, the telephone burst onto the world stage 150 years ago, a triumphant story of individual ingenuity and vision. Instantly, the ability to speak across vast distances began to transform every part of life: from business organization to military tactics, from news gathering to sex work.

But the story of The Telephone is also one of corrupt scheming and ruthless tactics; the race to the patent office, to make money, a contest replete with bribery, fraud and speculation. And no one, not even its inventors, realised what the telephone was good for or how ubiquitous it would become.

As the telephone settled into the background – in offices and on streets, on bedside tables and kitchen walls – people forgot how they ever lived without it. Now, as landlines, telephone books and telephone boxes vanish into the past, bestselling author James Gleick shows how this commonplace object irreversibly changed not only the world but who we are as human beings.

'Gleick does what only the best science writers can do: take a subject of which most of us are only peripherally aware and put it at the center of the universe' – Time