“Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it”*…
Einstein’s observation seems obvious in these days of Wikipedia and Google. But as Alex Houston reminds us, it wasn’t always so. She explains how telephone directories– and the people who used them– helped invent “information” as we know it…
For over a century, the physical phone book could be found everywhere, yet seemingly belonged nowhere: a book without a genre, at once mundane and mysterious, raising questions that vexed courts and corporations alike. In print, it’s all but vanished, though it lingers in the names of the websites and search engines that replaced it, the data they were built from, and the way we’ve learned to interact with information.
Southwestern University’s collection of Georgetown, Texas directories—eighteen volumes spanning 1913 to 1959—charts the evolution of the phone book in fine print and shows how it helped shape a vision of something new: networks people could not merely connect to, but could also ask things of.
The phone book is nearly as old as the phone itself. The telephone was born out of a mid-1870s race to improve upon the telegraph, which required trained operators at both ends and dedicated wires between them, and still wasn’t fast enough for an increasingly global market. The directory followed soon after to encourage its adoption and use.
In retrospect, the competition to top the telegraph ended on February 14, 1876, when two men filed competing U.S. patent claims for a method of transmitting speech electrically. Courts would eventually set the course of the American telecommunications industry by naming Alexander Graham Bell the sole inventor of the telephone and his Bell Company the sole holder of rights to electronically transmitted speech. At the time, though, there was real doubt about the business value of the so-called “talking telegraph”—enough that when Bell offered Western Union his patent, the telegraph company declined. The refusal reflected the verdict of the “practical telegraph men,” which Elisha Gray—the loser of the patent battle—put plainly: “In a business light it is of no importance. We can do more . . . with a wire now than with that method. And speed is the only thing we are after.”
The public, too, “had to be educated,” as the Bell Company itself put it, “to the necessity and advantage of the telephone.” Advertising could turn people into customers, but helping phone owners form what Bell called a “telephone habit” required a different tool. A 1941 article in the Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, “Business and the Telephone, 1878: As Illustrated by Early Directories,” links the telephone’s rapid adoption by businessmen to the equally speedy evolution of its instructive paper counterpart. Printed in New Haven in February 1878, the first phone book was not a book at all but a single page, with fifty-odd names listed in no discernible order. Boston and New York issued improved versions over the following months, with added attention to organization…
[Houston further unpacks the history of the telephone directory, explores the role of (mostly female) “operators,” and the emergence of “information”…]
… Given users’ demonstrated penchant for pushing the limits of acceptable use, it’s remarkable that telephone companies would hand them a word so obviously open to interpretation. But they did, and people interpreted it in its broadest sense almost at once. One consequence was a drop in directory use–why look up a number when you can ask someone for it? The result was notices like the one in the 1932 Georgetown directory, which scolded subscribers with the observation that “Nearly half of the numbers asked of information operators are correctly listed in the directory,” and implored them to “save time” by looking first.
But the bigger problem was what else people asked. As a Boston Daily Globe reporter observed in 1907, the telephone user had “learned that the telephone company maintains what is known as an information desk . . . and so when he has yearned to know something which would require the consultation of a dictionary, a directory, or a gazetteer, or in some cases the application of ordinary common sense, he adopts the easier method of stepping to the telephone and calling up, ‘Information’.”…
… Telephone companies began rescinding the offer of “Information” almost as soon as it was introduced. But just as the rollout of the word itself differed by region and exchange, so too did its withdrawal. Bell engineers studying operating methods concluded as early as 1904 that “the giving of information which is contained in the directory should be discouraged.” The Georgetown directories show that conclusion being carried out decades later through a new form of mechanization: the dial.
The 1940 directory featured a two-page spread on the dial—not for Georgetown, which remained manual, but for Jarrell, which converted first. Here, the information operator could be reached not by asking for her, but by dialing 00, though she would still—tantalizingly–“give you every possible assistance.” Georgetown followed in 1954, and “Information” went with the switchboard: subscribers were instructed to “Dial 11” for “Numbers Not in the Directory.”
In 1968, more than a decade after “Information” disappeared from Georgetown’s telephonic vocabulary, Bell officially retired the term and renamed the service “Directory Assistance.” Publicly, it maintained the personal framing—one ad observed that “When she was called ‘Information,’ people kept calling her for the wrong reasons”—while privately acknowledging an intentional shift toward mechanization. Nearly a century after the public had to be educated into the “habit” that built the telecommunications business, AT&T’s chairman, Frederick Kappel, said there was now a need for “public understanding that without mechanization, without automation” companies “couldn’t come close to giving the quantity and quality of service that customers today require.”
While, as one op-ed writer put it, the change to “Directory Assistance” meant the loss of “something warm and reassuring” found in “a friendly voice say[ing], ‘Information,’” a look back at the history of the telephone reminds us that intimacy was never the point. The phone’s invention sprang from a search for speed, and the insistence on its efficient operation had produced the very “human” function now being withdrawn for the same reason. Yet what the directory had taught, across all those years, was a habit in two parts: look it up, and when the book fails you, ask somebody.
In 1991, the Supreme Court held that a white-pages listing was “devoid of even the slightest trace of creativity” and therefore not copyrightable, overturning a century of doctrine that had protected directories as a reward for the labor of assembling them. In the Court’s view, the listings were raw fact, free for anyone to use. The value lay in what could be made of them, which was precisely the business of a fledgling tech industry inventing new ways to connect information and the people who used it. By the mid-1990s, companies were building online city directories using directory data, reducing the print versions to relics.
Two decades earlier, in 1969—a year after “Information” became “Directory Assistance”—a conference at the University of Chicago had taken up the future of information. In a keynote speech, psychologist and computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider called the decisions ahead “truly a crux for our civilization,” leading either “down to a mindless complex of electronically stored and retrieved facts” or “up toward a realization of the potentials of human creativity and human cooperation.” The stakes, he said, came down to a distinction: “It’s a choice between data and knowledge. It’s either mere access to information or interaction with information.”
Helping birth the Information Age: “How the Phone Book Taught America to Ask for Answers,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Albert Einstein
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As we look it up, we might send imaginative birthday greetings to a woman who helped shape modern telephony: Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; she was born on this date in 1914. Better known by her stage name, Hedy Lamarr, she became a huge movie star at MGM.
By the time American audiences were introduced to Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr in the 1938 film Algiers, she had already lived an eventful life. She got her scandalous start in film in Czechoslovakia (her first role was in the erotic Ecstasy). She was married at 19 in pre-World War II Europe to Fritz Mandl, a paranoid, overly protective arms dealer linked with fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany. After her father’s sudden death and as the war approached, she fled Mandl’s country estate in the middle of the night and escaped to London. Unable to return home to Vienna where her mother lived, and determined to get into the movies, she booked passage to the States on the same ship as mogul Louis B. Mayer. Flaunting herself, she drew his attention and signed with his MGM Studios before they docked.
Arriving in Hollywood brought her a new name (Lamarr was originally Kiesler), fame, multiple marriages and divorces and a foray into groundbreaking work as a producer, before she eventually became a recluse. But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Lamarr’s life isn’t as well known: during WWII, when she was 27, the movie star invented and patented an ingenious forerunner of current high-tech communications…
Read on for the story of the movie star who invented spread-spectrum radio, the secure signal technology that helped the Allies avoid having their radio communications intercepted by the Axis forces, and that lies at the heart of the cellular phone system that we all use today: “Why Hedy Lamarr Was Hollywood’s Secret Weapon.”
“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid” – Hedy Lamarr
“Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”*…
Still, as Amanda Shendruk reminds us (in her fascinating newsletter Not-Ship), sometimes incorrect predictions have something useful to teach us…
According to a paper published in one of the world’s top scientific journals exactly 66 years ago today — the world will end on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. “At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia,” wrote Heinz von Foerster and his coauthors in Science.
But don’t cancel your plans! The end may be nigh, but it won’t be next week.
Von Foerster was worried about too many people. So, he fit a curve to 24 historical population estimates and found that population growth wasn’t just rising, it was accelerating. That was 1960, when the population was doubling about every 30 years. By his math, it would double every five years by 2016, and every six months by the end of 2025. And by Nov. 13, 2026, the global population would be doubling so fast that it would shoot off toward infinity.
Here’s what actually happened.
The doomsday formula was right — but only until the 1990s
Von Foerster’s population predictions compared with real global population numbers:
Global population growth peaked in the 1960s, just as the paper came out, and birth rates began to fall. The global birth rate today is roughly half what it was in 1960.
The authors didn’t really expect infinite people. But their worry was real nonetheless: that kind of growth couldn’t last. “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,” they wrote. “They will be squeezed to death.”
Today, “squeezed to death” isn’t the doomsday most of us fear, but it mirrored worries of the time. Runaway population was a defining anxiety of the decade, one that would peak in 1968 with The Population Bomb — an alarmist, bestselling book predicting mass famine.
Still, von Foerster’s prediction belongs to a very old tradition: Doomsday dates are poor guides to the future, but great records of the moments that produced them.
I compiled a dataset of about 280 dated doomsday predictions from Wikipedia and the Doomsday Scoreboard. There’s no way to know how complete this list is. I’m going to go with “not very.” But we can learn from it nonetheless.
The earliest is 66–70 CE, when a Jewish sect saw the revolt against Rome as the final battle. Before then, doomsday predictions lacked fixed dates. Precision arrived thanks to linear timelines, standardized calendars, and Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic literature.
The end is always near
Dated predictions of the end of the world, by decade:
It seems to me that doomsday dates are a bit like monster movies. They’re never really about the monsters, but about our shared anxieties.
For most doomsday dates, God is the destroyer. But signs that the end was near, and often the details of how it would happen, came from the world around them. When the Black Death devastated Europe in the 1340s, some took it as proof that the end times had begun. The Christians who braced for the end in 1666 were unnerved by the 666 in the date, the number of the beast. In 1856, as British colonists took Xhosa land in southern Africa, the prophet Nongqawuse foretold a day when the dead would rise and the Europeans would be swept into the sea — not the end of the world, but of colonial rule.
“Concern about the end of the world has always been with us,” said Matthew Gabriele, a medieval studies scholar and apocalypse expert, in an interview with Nautilus. “But the change from belief that something theological would drive it, to the possibility of human-made destruction, is absolutely new.”
In 1945, we got the atom bomb. And the ability to bring about our own demise. Predictions continued to mirror our anxieties: nuclear war, of course (at least 19 predictions), then aliens at the dawn of the space age (though first as messengers; only later as destroyers). There was Y2K in 2000, and in 2008, a black hole from the Large Hadron Collider.
Today, our most prominent warnings rarely come with dates. Instead, they come wrapped in the language of risk and probability. The Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists adjusts each year to show how close it thinks humanity is to destroying itself, now stands at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. And in the AI world — where “end is nigh” headlines appear almost weekly — people speak of p(doom), or the “probability of doom.” (I’ve ranted about p(doom) before. Tl;dr, it’s a load of bunk.)
Von Foerster’s doomsday date tells us what worried people in 1960: too many people and not enough room. Our warnings today say just as much about now. We look to scientific or industry authorities, not prophets, to tell us how close the end is. And the threats they track — nuclear weapons, a warming climate, artificial intelligence — are all of our own making…
“Good news! The world won’t end on Nov. 13, 2026,” from @not-ship.com.
* John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
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As we contemplate our concerns, we might send blotched birthday greetings to Hermann Rorschach; he was born on this date in 1884. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, his education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. Rorschach knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli and believed that the subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His method has come to be known as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders.
“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”*…
As we ponder the impact of the defenestration of seasoned, competent leadership in so many corners of the executive branch (c.f., the Defense Department, the Department of Justice, and… well, sadly, pretty much across the board), an unfortunately timely observation from Mandy Brown (in her lovely newsletter, A Working Library)…
The Peter Principle posits that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. What happens after that point? The implicit assumption is that they stop getting promoted and linger at whatever level they’ve arrived at, and surely all of us can point to mediocre leaders who seem to exhibit exactly that circumstance. But in fact, that situation is not stable but subject to career pressure, as Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf define it in Making a Career in Dictatorship. Unable to move up, and very possibly unable to meet expectations, the person who is subject to the Peter Principle is at risk of losing their job, or even their entire career. Which means they might take an even greater risk to save it. Gläßel and Scharpf write:
The logic of career pressure also offers a compelling twist to the Peter Principle. The Principle posits that individuals in hierarchical organizations are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, where they can no longer perform effectively and cease to advance. In contrast, our logic shows how these individuals may surpass this point and climb the hierarchy even further. Career-pressured individuals often take on high-risk, labor-intensive, or morally contentious tasks. By loyally executing the organization’s dirty work, they can reestablish their value, regain competitiveness, and even outpace peers who were previously ahead of them. Alternatively, they may resort to sabotaging superiors or higher-ups by making false allegations or revealing secrets to create vacancies above them and forcibly advance their careers.
Gläßel and Scharpf, Making a Career in Dictatorship, page 182
In other words, someone promoted up to their level of incompetence, sensing a threat to their own livelihood, becomes a threat to everyone else. I’m reminded here of David Graeber’s theory in Bullshit Jobs, that a great many management jobs are basically feudal retainers—people kept around in order to make the folks above them look good. Very often, making someone else look good may well mean tackling the dirty work for them so that they can keep their hands clean.
The petered leader has in effect been made an imposter—a real imposter, not a “syndromed” or perceived one. They must seem competent, to preserve the appearance that they belong in the role; while in fact they are not capable of delivering on their actual responsibilities and may have been quietly tasked with unrelated services both illegal and unethical. As a result, one of the primary tools of the real imposter is obscurity. Imposters cloak themselves in a fog of obfuscation and busyness, so that the people around them can never say for sure what it is they are doing, or how well (or not) they are doing it.
What we call imposter syndrome was originally termed imposter phenomena, a term that makes plain that it is something that can be observed, not merely felt. The transformation into a syndrome shifted the experience of being impostered by a patriarchal, white supremacist society into a medicalized disorder, something for which the impostered person must be treated. That’s a neat trick: to shift the locus of treatment to the mistreated person, rather than the system that caused her harm. But perhaps there’s even another, more diabolical move here. What if the popularity of imposter syndrome is, in part, a means of obscuring the actual imposters in our midst? What are we missing when we look inward instead of around?
On the dangers of promoting people past their levels of competence at work: “Petered” from @aworkinglibrary.com.
Pair with: “How to Fix a Broken Hierarchy from the Inside.”
(Image above: source)
* Dr. Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle (written with Raymond Hull)
###
As we fumble with fakers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1874, in Harpers Weekly, that editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast gave the Republican Party its mascot, the elephant. (Contrary to popular belief, Nast did not create Uncle Sam [the male personification of the United States Federal Government], Columbia [the female personification of American values], nor the Democratic donkey, though he did popularize those symbols through his artwork.)
“It may have been quixotic, but it was magnificent”*…
In July of 2018, Brent Underwood purchased the former mining town of Cerro Gordo alongside the abandoned Cerro Gordo Mines for $1.4 million. His plan was– and is– to develop the town into an artist destination for tourists and group events, while maintaining the historic nature of the property.
He checks in on how it’s going…
If you ever plan on riding out a pandemic in an abandoned mining town at 8,200 feet, there are a few things I’d recommend bringing: a four-wheel-drive truck, more than a few days of food, and at least some decent boots.
I brought none of these.
Instead, I arrived at Cerro Gordo, California, in the middle of a blizzard in March 2020, driving a base model Tacoma, and wearing white Allbirds, a few inches of ankle showing. A quarter mile from town, my bald tires slid off the road, the truck got stuck, and I walked the rest of the way in.
Six years later, I’m still here. I’ve traded my Allbird slippers for steel-toed boots and my Tacoma for a Tundra. And most of the things that once felt absurd—like getting buried in snow in March—barely register. My mailbox is an hour away and 4,500 feet in elevation below me. My driveway is an eight-mile dirt road that is almost never maintained. My bathroom is an outhouse where, on windy days, dust of questionable origin comes up through the floorboards. In the winter, sometimes I wake up to the thermometer reading 17 degrees. Indoors.
But the strangest thing about living here, after a decade of living in cities like New York and Austin, is how quickly it stops feeling strange at all.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Thousands of people have chosen to live in Cerro Gordo over the years. In the late 1800s, it was home to California’s largest silver mine, surrounded by hundreds of buildings and thousands of residents. There were at least five hotels, seven saloons, two brothels, three general stores, multiple restaurants, barber shops, and even doctors and lawyers—but no jail…
The rest of his remarkable report: “What It’s Actually Like to Live in an Abandoned California Ghost Town,” from @outsidemag.bsky.social.
For a reverse angle, see this story of a centuries-old practice: “How Rome’s Urban Shepherds Adapt and Survive”
* J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (better known as Peter Pan)
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As we get away from it all, we might recall that it was on this date in 1217 that The Charter of the Forest was first issued by the young King Henry III (acting under the regency of William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke) as a complementary charter to Magna Carta from which it had evolved. The Charter of the Forest re-established rights of access for free men to the royal forest that had been eroded by King William the Conqueror and his heirs. Many of its provisions were in force for centuries afterwards. Indeed, In 1154, King Henry II had placed new restrictions and levies on woodland, fields, and heathland.
While Magna Carta dealt largely with the rights of barons, The Charter of the Forest restored to the commoner some fundamental rights, privileges, and protections against the abuses of an encroaching aristocracy. It returned rights to the common man including access, pasture, grazing, turf cutting, and firewood collection, and ended harsh penalties.
“Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable”*…
A number of entrenched interests have been playing a long game. There’s (all too appropriately) a good bit of attention trained on efforts like The Federalist Society‘s attempts to remake the legal and judicial landscape and The Heritage Foundation‘s “Project 2025” plan to reshape the federal government along right-wing lines. Both reflect the careful cultivation, over decades, first of sympathetic “scholarship” and opinion, then of political action.
But as Kate Yoder of Grist explains, there’s another– longer, deeper– program at work: from the family car to the dream kitchen, fossil fuel companies have sold a vision of prosperity that depended on their own products. Over a century of evidence shows how they have done it…
What does going on a date have to do with fossil fuels? Everything, according to the petroleum industry.
One advertisement from the pipeline company Energy Transfer follows two people getting ready for a date, the man primping with hair gel, the woman applying lipstick, before meeting at a bar. “That connection was brought to you by petroleum products,” the narrator says. “But what if we lived in a world without oil and natural gas?”
The story rewinds to the beginning, except this time, the woman looks bewildered as her phone with the dating app evaporates in her hands. She gets lipstick all over her cheek when the car she’s riding in hits the pavement without its tires. As his hair gel disappears, the man looks into the mirror, baffled. When they sit down across from each other, makeup, hair dye, and glasses fade away. In the game playing on a TV in the bar, a football disintegrates a second before the kicker swings his leg at empty air.
The commercial, which has racked up 7.4 million views since it appeared four years ago, taps into the fact that fossil fuels have become embedded in American life (what’s more American than football?). Oil and gas not only influence how people get around town, but also where they live, how they dress, and how they cook food in their kitchens. This all feels so ordinary that most people don’t notice how pervasive petroleum is, powering our lives while hiding in plain sight. Though it might seem inevitable that we live this way, a Grist investigation found that this idea of what’s “normal” was shaped by decades of advertising, public relations propaganda, and broader efforts to sway American culture, from radio programs to Hollywood films.
“Our dependence on oil didn’t just happen,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.
This campaign started about a century ago, when companies began strategizing how to create long-term demand for fossil fuels and the products that ran on them. Billboards showcased happy families on the road in their cars, films showed stylish women cooking over the flame of a gas stove, and magazines featured men pushing their gas-powered mowers across soon-to-be perfectly manicured lawns. The message was often left unsaid: The American way of life runs on fossil fuels.
There’s a well-documented history showing that Exxon and other oil giants understood the dangers of global warming by the 1970s based on their own research and still spent decades publicly downplaying, or outright denying, the science. But the story of how oil and gas companies coaxed Americans into accepting — even desiring — a life built on fossil fuels has largely escaped attention, buried in the pages of obscure trade journals.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the oil industry spent millions of dollars a year on campaigns to “educate” the public about the wonders of petroleum and how it advanced the “American way.” The natural gas industry promoted all-gas “dream kitchens” and paraded them in front of the editors of Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. They sold a vision of the American Dream that required their products — a cultural legacy that has been devastating for efforts to rein in climate change and shift to a cleaner future.
This history offers an explanation for why Americans have had such a strong reaction to the idea of banning polluting gas ranges (“they can pry it from my cold dead hands”) or requiring more sales of electric vehicles over gas-powered cars. Is this debate really just about technology, or about what the burning of fossil fuels represents — freedom and a sense of identity? President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda is deeply nostalgic for what oil once promised: economic might, a higher standard of living, the chance to rise above your station and maybe make a fortune. In his inauguration speech last year, Trump promised a return to these ideals. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said.
As the world enters an “age of electricity” powered increasingly by solar, wind, and other low-carbon energy sources, the United States often appears to be stuck in the past. The Trump administration has prolonged the life of coal plants and opened up new areas to oil drilling, while paying companies billions of dollars to stop offshore wind projects. The explanation, when it’s offered, often returns to the same theme. Earlier this year, when the Trump administration scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as “restoring the American Dream.” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers summed up the sentiment this summer: “President Trump was given a mandate to roll back the radical climate policies that are burning a hole through taxpayers’ wallets and jeopardizing the American Dream for future generations.”
The words echo what the oil industry has been telling Americans for a century: Without fossil fuels, there is no “good life,” only sacrifice…
Read on for the remarkable tale: “The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream,” from @grist.org.
See also: “How Big Oil Shaped America’s Parks.”
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As we look behind the curtain, we might that it was on this date in 1895 that George Selden was granted the first patent for a gasoline-powered automobile. In the patent, which Seldon had filed several years earlier, on May 8, 1879 (eight years before the public introduction of the Benz Patent Motorwagen in Europe, built in 1886 and widely considered the first automobile), he described not only the engine but also a complete automobile incorporating such features as a clutch, compressed air self-starter, and steering system (No. 549,160). He maintained that it was the combination of these elements, together with his engine, made the road-engine patentable. Selden’s day job was as a patent attorney, so he knew to delay the issue of the patent by sending amendments and other communications every two years. Meanwhile, others did the hard work of developing the automobile, and his patent became more valuable. Years of legal wrangling for profits followed.
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