Have I done the world good, or have I added a menace?
Guglielmo Marconi
It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us - the high, the low, the rich , the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage - may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss - except the inventor of the telephone.
Mark Twain, 1890
There is no doubt that the day will come, maybe when you and I are forgotten, when copper wires, gutta-percha coverings, and iron sheathings will be relegated to the Museum of Antiquities. Then, when a person wants to telegraph to a friend, he knows not where, he will call an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear, but will be silent to everyone else. He will call "Where are you?" and the reply will come, "I am at the bottom of the coal-mine" or "Crossing the Andes" or "In the middle of the Pacific"; or perhaps no reply will come at all, and he may then conclude that his friend is dead.
Professor W.E. Ayrton (member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers), in a lecture at the Imperial Institute, 1897
It (the telephone) will unmake our work. No greater instrument of counter revolution and conspiracy can be imagined.
Josef Vissaryonovich Stalin
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You see, wire telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates in exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
Albert Einstein
Yet More Telephone Trouble
The National Telephone Company, the target of frequent complaints about the level of service, draws attention to what it describes as "the proved fact that subscribers frequently make it impossible for the operator properly to attend to her duties because they bawl along the call-wire at the same time with other subscribers, and because they employ the call-wire for abusing the operators, frequently using very violent and brutal language to them, so much so that at times they drive them into hysterics." No one can condone the use of violent and abusive language to young ladies, even if they be telephone girls.
Financial Times, 31 March 1898