Humane Politics and Methods of Inquiry by Ithiel de Sola Pool

Author:Ithiel de Sola Pool [Pool, Ithiel de Sola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Methodology, Public Policy, Social Science, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781412825719
Google: 3SAtCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29653810
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2000-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Some Forecasts

We shall offer further speculation about the factors contributing to accurate forecasts, but first we shall examine closely a few predictions, who made them, and how they look in retrospect.

Universal Service

The telephone was an expensive device in its early years; a subscriber paid a flat amount for unlimited service. Furthermore, the combinatorial nature of a network meant that linkage complexity increased faster than the number of nodes. Until fully automated switching, the company’s cost of serving each subscriber was greater the larger the number of other subscribers.5

With switchboards, the problem was partially solved. Still, as the number of subscribers grew, the operator’s job in making the connection grew more than proportionally; a manual switchboard could only be of a certain size. Bell understood this; in Financial Notes in 1905, he is quoted as arguing that as the number of people in an exchange increased, the operator’s work increased exponentially; hence, the exchanges would eventually all have to be automated:

In the telephone of the future I look for all this business to be done automatically.… If this can be accomplished, it will do away with the cast army of telephone operators, and so reduce the expense that the poorest man cannot afford to be without this telephone.

One early telephone manager commented that “so far as he could see, all he had to do was get enough subscribers and the company would go broke.”6 Telephone service in large communities was therefore very expensive.7 In 1896, the fee for service in New York was $20 a month. The average income of a workman in that year was $38.50 a month, a six-room tenement in New York rented for about $10 a month, and a quart of milk sold for 5¢. The first subscribers to the telephone were business offices, not ordinary homes. Residential phones in the AT&T National Telephone Directory of 1896 were almost 30 percent in Chicago, one in six or seven in Boston and Washington, and only about one in twenty in New York and Philadelphia.

Yet Bell’s letter of 1878 mentioned connecting “private dwellings, counting houses, shops, manufacturies, etc. etc.,” in that order; he was not thinking of the phone as just a business device. He talks of “establishing direct connection between any two places in the city.” not just a system limited to industrial or affluent neighborhoods. Perhaps it was too early for him to assert categorically, as he did slightly later, that the telephone could even become an instrument for the poor. But the goal of universality, which became one of the watchwords of the Bell System, was there from the beginning.

Though in its first two decades the telephone’s growth had largely been in business or among the rich, by 1896 several factors led to a rapid expansion of service. There was the continued acceleration of an ongoing exponential process of growth, and (with the expansion of the initial Bell patents in 1893) competitors sought to discover and occupy parts of the market not yet served—for example, the fast growing Midwest and rural areas.

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