ABSTRACT
His account is revealing in that it records the stratification of staff working for the Department of Posts and Telegraphs at the time. Abiding by the structural logic of systems, narratives of telecommunications tend to collapse distinctions between those working on the infrastructure; between, for instance, those such as Collins tasked with the maintenance of a network and those engineers driving its technological development. Robert Britt Horwitz, for example, prefaces his account of the development of telecommunications with a warning that to identify ‘inventors’ in its history is to misunderstand the entire enterprise. He argues that it should instead be seen as a ‘communal [and] derivative’ process in which generations build upon earlier experiments and the story of happenstance commonly told about the birth of the telephone fits within this schema (Horwitz 1989: 91). Conducting experiments to increase the carrying capacity of the telegraph line in 1875, Alexander Graham Bell asked his assistant to remove an electrically vibrated reed which happened to stick to an electro-magnet. The sound made as it was plucked was conducted to a corresponding reed in an adjoining room, leading Bell to deduce that it should be possible to transmit speech in a similar manner. He filed his patent in 1876, just
hours before Elisha Gray filed at the same office for a very similar invention.
