ABSTRACT
Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone in 1876; two years later, Thomas Edison received one for the phonograph. Bell’s first phone call was to his assistant in the next room; the two machines were connected by a copper wire. Edison’s phonograph recorded by having a vibrating stylus scratch the sound waves onto a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a rotating cylinder. Although neither invention exactly qualifies as a new form of art, their widespread acceptance and further development over the next 125 years provides a good metaphor for both the extent of the technical innovations that took place in the twentieth century, and the equally innovative but still unimaginable ones yet to come in the twenty-first. In the same way that the mechanism of the phonograph has evolved from tinfoil and a stylus to iPods and surround-sound CDs, and the telephone has morphed into a wireless miniature of itself, complete with color screen, speed dialing, text messaging, and caller ID, continued wide-ranging innovations, coupled with new inventions, can be expected to further alter the technology that surrounds us, and that, in turn, will allow us to create new forms of art.
