dissolved by the invention of the telegraph, which now 
encouraged provincial competition. The telegraph freed the 
marginal provincial press from dependence on the big 
metropolitan press. In the whole field of the electric revolution, 
this pattern of decentralization appears in multiple guises. It is 
Sir Lewis Namier’s view that telephone and airplane are the 
biggest single cause of trouble in the world today. Professional 
diplomats with delegated powers have been supplanted by 
prime ministers, presidents, and foreign secretaries, who think 
they could conduct all important negotiations personally. This 
is also the problem encountered in big business, where it has 
been found impossible to exercise delegated authority when 
using the telephone. The very nature of the telephone, as all 
electric media, is to compress and unify that which had 
previously been divided and specialized. Only the “authority of 
knowledge” works by telephone because of the speed that