James Gleick + Rivka Galchen: The Telephone: A New History

Join us for a release event with historian and biographer James Gleick, discussing his new book THE TELEPHONE: A NEW HISTORY.

Moderating this discussion is writer Rivka Galchen. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of The Telephone: A New History here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by Oct. 30 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------

From the bestselling author of Chaos and The Information, a sweeping history of the instrument that created modern life.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell said, “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you” into a contraption he called the telephone. For the first time, a voice was carried along a wire. This feat has long been celebrated as a triumph of individual ingenuity and vision. In fact, the invention was a contest replete with bribery, fraud, and speculation, and no one, not even its inventors, realized what it was good for or how ubiquitous it would become.

It would teach us new words and a new way to speak, with instant feeling, instant possibilities. The Bell System would become the largest monopoly in history: the maker and owner of all America’s phones. The science from Bell Labs—pulsing wires, glowing vacuum tubes, the electronic transistor—would usher in the Information Age. Along the way, the telephone changed human nature, augmenting our bodies. It gave us the party line, the busy signal, dial tones, the late-night D.J., and the booty call. It magnified the possibilities of government, business, friendship, and love.
Today we are more dependent than ever on little objects called phones, although their ability to make calls is incidental. The phone book and phone booth may be vanishing from memory, but James Gleick shows the telephone’s legacy is deeply ingrained in our networks, in our sophistication about networks, in the primacy of information, in the need for connection. The Telephone: A New History is a revelation: a story of technological breakthroughs that is also a universal history of intimate life.