Telegraph seems like the more significant milestone, but putting that in the title of a book wouldn't sell many copies.
Which, after all, is why people want to read about it. Most people don’t have much firsthand experience with the telegraph.
The new Gleick book this piece is excerpted from gets the most into the technical aspects, which makes sense given Gleick’s background. There’s also a lot about the patent disputes in the early days of the phone and its impact in its early days on popular culture.
I think there’s still more phone history to be written. I’d like to see a social history of the phone in the period basically from WW II to the iPhone, including unexpected and deviant use of the phone: phone phreaking, prank calls, music over the phone, sex lines, collect calling, right wing voice message lines, phone zap protests, telemarketing, and I’m sure things I don’t even know about. Plus how the rise of technology like cordless phones, extension lines, etc. delivered privacy for phone users in their own homes.
The thing these have in common is that they're connecting all the people. There is no intermediary necessary. Probably you won't send a postcard to some child you've never met in Shanghai, make a phone call to a random farmer in Ukraine or use a video chat to call random Venezuelans on the Internet, but you can and that's why these networks are so powerful.
If the UPU begins a thousand years earlier that falls by the same reasoning, a thousand years earlier too many people aren't literate, so they need to have their letter written by someone else, and the recipient must find someone to read it - but by the time of the UPU literacy is widespread.
The pocket-destroying cellphone I have from my company (which I must carry at all times, because of on-call) comes with spyware, it also comes with a two-factor authentication app that flashes an angry error message because I don't allow notifications. I'm of course exaggerating a little and speaking subjectively, but that phone feels more like a slave collar than something I really want to have around, and the feeling hasn't subsided one bit in the five years I've carried it.
Even with my personal phone (an iphone), things are not much better. It sends who-knows-what-of-my-data to god-knows-where, and of course keeping the radios active for all that chitchat costs battery time. It doesn't allow me to run any custom-made app I may need without paying Apple a hefty developer subscription and getting a Mac. And, ultimately, it's Apple's device, with security functions to protect Apple and to guarantee other companies with apps running in the phone that the device won't really let me if I try to, say, break their DRM.
“How the Telephone Changed the World”
(Though in this rare instance the the title still makes some sense.)