Inventing American Telecommunications
Peoples & Things
00:00
Is There a Monopoly in Telephones?
In Chicago, around 1902, the average length of a telephone call was about 3.1 miles or something. The big money in telephone was in cities and cities were pretty dense. Charles Norman Fay basically said that if you don't like our telephone service, just go somewhere else. Go away. We're going to run it for these guys who can afford it. And they are... Machine politics are politics too, Richard. It is a political calculus here as well as an economic calculus because expanding the network is very expensive.
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