Time and Distance Overcome
Someone might say that the telephone is one of the single greatest and most important inventions ever. The telephone is the reason that we are able to talk to people who are geographically not in the same place as we are, without having to wait for a letter or an e-mail. Today the phone is one of the most common pieces of technology we have in our households, which means that we can easily communicate with all kinds of different people from all over the world. Eula Bliss also said: "I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle". However, the telephone has also created an unmeasurable amount of death and chaos throughout history.
The eye-opening essay titled: "Time and Distance Overcome" by Eula Bliss is an essay written about how telephones quickly spread throughout USA and which difficulties the telephone met doing so. This evolution started out when Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his first telephone in 1876. Shortly hereafter, he realized that it was hard to convince his financial supporters that it was a good investment, because they had to connect it all by wires, which had to be suspended from pole to pole. However, he quickly found a solution to that problem; simply by explaining how the waterlines already went from house to house. At first only rich people had telephones which were typically connected between their households and their working places. But then Rutherford B. Hayes and Thomas Edison declared that it was "one of the greatest events since creation." And that it "annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch." This meant that the popularity of the telephone industry grew fast and that many people began installing telephones in their homes. Nevertheless the pioneers experienced obstacles, for instance how a war was declared against telephone poles in both South Dakota and Wisconsin, where policemen and firemen were ordered to cut down telephone poles. This instance let to Bell telephone company having men standing on each top of telephone poles, so that they could wire between them. We are also told how many black men were hung from the telephone poles during race riots. Finally, the author also explains how she was told as a kid that her grandfather fell from one of them and was smashed onto the road. As a kid, she always thought that the telephone poles were very beautiful, and that she believed that the telephone itself was a miracle.
Today, however, she does not look at the telephone poles in the same way. As her sister reminds her that nothing is innocent, she just wants it to be unrepentant.
The essay''s composition is split into three parts which highlight three different positions. The first part of the essay focuses on how hard it was to convince people that it was a good idea to have telephones and the telephone poles. The second part of the essay focuses on the negative events which the telephone poles was a part of, and how they might even have been seen as a symbol of something that people feared and also how racism had been a big part of many people's lives and how black people where suppressed. In the last part of the essay, the author mainly focuses on how she used to see telephone poles and the telephone as a fantastic invention. However, she later became aware how much evil they had caused. In addition, she has hope for the future and that there might just be hope for the future by telling that some of the poles actually grew small leafs.
The general composition also makes the essay''s flow better, as the first segment starts out slowly and merely explains the background story of the telephone and the telephone poles. The second segment is faster-paced, and we get a lot information concerning numerous murders, and this also reveals the problematics caused by this. The final segment functions as a sort of conclusion to the above, reminding all Americans about their dark past, and to be open to the taboo concerning racism. In this manner, the introduction of the telephone is a symbol of the introduction of equal rights for black people in America.
Eula Biss'' intention with this essay is to enlighten a new generation of people and to remind us of the horrible events from the late 1800s and the early 1900s. She describes how painful it was to be black in America during that period, and that is also a way to make up with some of the patriotic Americans, who virtually worship American history through technological revolution. However, it also covers another theme, which is the fear of the un-known and the fear of change. Today something as "simple" as a phone seems so normal and the fact that anyone could fear a telephone almost seems ridicules. Throughout history there have been many inventions, which all seemed very new and some of them almost seemed as if it should not be possible for man to create such a thing. As J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted after building the atomic bomb: "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds".
Although we get a lot of knowledge about the horrible accidents, which have happened in the past, we also get a kind of hope from the last part in the essay, which also reminds us that it is in the past, and generations will come and go, but we as human beings are improving our society and ourselves.