Just a copper wire

New York, 1888

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDER A TELEPHONE POLE

I am a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
     tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
     me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the
     shine drying,
               A copper wire.

Carl Sandburg composed this short poem in 1916.  In just a few brief lines, he manages to capture the pure simplicity of telephony - one single copper wire strung up in the street, which carries all of human experience: life and death, love and hate.  Conveying human speech, the wire itself speaks with its (his? her?) own voice in the first person to us directly.

And what a refreshing change to read something from this era that talks of "men and women" and not the bland, generic "Mankind" or "Man."  Of course, when contemporaries wrote of mankind, especially in the context of telecommunications, they usually inferred men, excluding women.  Sandburg redresses the balance by including women as telephone users.

Incidentally, his mention of wires being exposed to the elements brings to mind those epic old photographs of telephone wires collapsing in snow storms.  Derricks perched on rooftops throughout urban centres were easily felled when the wind was strong.  They were loaded with wires (one for each subscriber) and engineers had to start from scratch when the whole structure came down.
 

One-sided conversations

This will be an ongoing list of references mentioning the one-sided conversations you hear when listening to a person talking on a phone.

Giddens, consequences of modernity, p141
You are more 'connected' with the person you are conversing with on the phone (who may be in Australia) than with the person who is sitting in the same room.
* "space of flows" - the network here is another space that you occupy that doesn't overlap with the physical place you occupy.
* reminiscent of Thrift's whales; 'being with' someone, the space where you are 'with' this other person is huge.


Huxley, brave new world (1932)
"parleying with silence"

Montgomery, per telephone (1893)
Play with opening scene - ten minutes of female gossip on phone
Wasn't this boring for the audience?  Was it such a novelty?  A new experience for both writer and listener, who had to figure out context etc. from only one speaker.  Before the phone era, where/how could you 'eavesdrop' on someone and only hear half the conversation?


Twain, telephonic conversation (1880)