Synopsis
From the New York Times bestselling author, a thrilling history of the telephone and how we fell in and out of love with a technology that changed not just the world, but changed us.
'Charts our distance-compressing, time-shifting telephonic adventure with exceptional brio and subtlety' – Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction
One hundred and fifty years ago the telephone burst onto the world stage like magic, a supernatural instrument bringing voices from afar. Its invention has been celebrated as a triumph of individual ingenuity and vision, but was in fact a contest replete with bribery, fraud and speculation, and no one, not even its inventors, realised what it was good for or how ubiquitous it would become.
Instantly, the ability to speak across vast distances began to transform every part of life: from business organization to military tactics, from news gathering to sex work. Along the way, the telephone changed human nature. As it settled into the background – in offices and on streets, on bedside tables and kitchen walls – people forgot how they ever lived without it.
In The Telephone, bestselling author James Gleick reveals the continuous revolution sparked by its invention and the corrupt scheming and ruthless tactics of those who sought to make money from it, tracking the rise of the largest monopoly in history.
As dial telephones, landlines, telephone books and telephone booths vanish into the past, he shows how this commonplace object irreversibly changed not only the world but who we are as human beings.
'Gleick does what only the best science writers can do: take a subject of which most of us are only peripherally aware and put it at the center of the universe' – Time
Details
12 November 2026
9781035056668Reviews
The Telephone is at once a history of an invention and much more than that. It's a book about innovators and monopolists, tinkerers and geniuses, and, ultimately, the remaking – and re-remaking – of America. Science and technology never seem more exciting than when James Gleick is writing about them
That little device in your pocket has transformed so much – Long-distance! Operators! The Yellow Pages! – into history. Who better to chronicle it all than the masterful James Gleick? From Bell and Watson to Steve Jobs, from patent wars to the evolving nature of conversation, Gleick charts our distance-compressing, time-shifting telephonic adventure with exceptional brio and subtlety
