Imagine a world where a cutting remark took six weeks to deliver by clipper ship. The sheer, beautiful delay of it all! You could have a furious argument with a business partner in London, but by the time your scalding letter arrived, he’d have been buried for a month from cholera, and you’d feel like a real jerk. That’s the world we lost. We moved from the Pony Express, where a man on a horse was the pinnacle of speed, to the telegraph, which for the first time in human history, decoupled a message from its physical transportation. It was a miracle!
And we promptly used it to send the first-ever spam message in 1864, a telegram sent to British politicians advertising cheap dentures. We've been using breakthrough tech to annoy each other ever since. The telephone then created the new anxiety of who could call you, at home, uninvited.
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