Comment by ykler

"People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it." He is probably right. And yet, how tragic. Forty hours is not that long. Imagine that the telephone hadn't been invented. Would we still today be living in a society where people went to the telegraph office to send telegraphs but basically no one could telegraph themselves?