system—electric technology.

     The New York Daily Graphic  for March 15, 1877, 
portrayed on its front page “The Terrors of the Telephone—The 
Orator of the Future.” A disheveled Svengali stands before a 
microphone haranguing in a studio. The same mike is shown in 
London, San Francisco, on the Prairies, and in Dublin. Curiously, 
the newspaper of that time saw the telephone as a rival to the 
press as P. A. system, such as radio was in fact to be fifty 
years later. But the telephone, intimate and personal, is the 
most removed of any medium from the P. A. form. Thus wire-
tapping seems even more odious than the reading of other 
people’s letters.

     The word “telephone” came into existence in 1840, before 
Alexander Graham Bell was born. It was used to describe a