ABSTRACT
Correspondence education in the United States will be one hundred years old in 1992, if one's reckoning takes as its starting-point the University of Chicago's correspondence study department formed by William Rainey Harper. At almost the same moment, little more than one hundred years ago, Alexander Graham Bell was attempting in 1877 to convince Western Union to purchase the patents for his new invention, the telephone (they refused). Considering how very new the field of telecommunications is, it perhaps shouldn't be startling to recognize that a scant twenty years ago the field as we know it today didn't exist at all. As one report puts it, the communications world in 1970 was ‘pre-microelectronics and pre-fiber optics, pre-micro-computer and pre-VCR’ (US Department of Commerce 1988:4).
