Quotes from Tom Wheeler

Racing at four and a half times the speed of any other conveyance, Tom Thumb was both a marvel and a mystery. The train's owners and occupants first questioned whether the human body could endure such speed. Many of the passengers on Tom Thumb's first run were human guinea pigs who brought along paper and pencil to test whether cogent thought was possible at such speed.47

Giving the user, rather than the network, control to call forth the high-speed information he or she creates or consumes defines the era we are pioneering.

Half a dozen years later, the Census Report of 1852 featured a dozen pages heralding the expansion of the telegraph, including a map of all the existing telegraph lines. North of the Mason-Dixon Line it looked like a spider's web. South of that demarcation, however, were only two threads, one running down the east coast, and the other down the Mississippi Valley.

In many ways Morse's ignorance acted to his advantage.

because organizing "anti" is easier than building "pro.

It all seems so curious today as 300 hours' worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Eerily, the awakening occurred eighteen years to the day from Samuel Morse's "What hath God wrought" message. When Confederate general Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson changed the nature of the war by marching to threaten Washington, Lincoln responded by changing the nature of his leadership.

But with twenty-four hours of airtime to fill, the fact that the storm had not yet hit was news.

CNN may have meant coverage of an approaching storm was news, but today, when everyone is connected, it means everyone is a reporter commenting on and providing thoughts about the storm or any other topic.

Airtime remittances use mobile minutes as a pseudo-currency that can be transferred between phones and exchanged for goods.

By one estimate, more books were printed in the first fifty years after Gutenberg's discovery than had been copied by all the scribes in Europe in the previous thousand years.

Watson recorded that he "could unmistakably hear the tones of [Bell's] voice and almost catch a word now and then.

The visionary behind this idea was a Polish immigrant named Paul Baran.

The technological success of the telegraph failed to drive revenue simply because Americans could not imagine how they could benefit from the breakthrough.

Mr. Watson—Come here" joined "What hath God wrought" in immortality

Try to imagine," one commentator observed, "the ambivalent anxieties of a freewheeling people with one foot in manure and the other in the telegraph office.

Later that evening, Alexander Graham Bell wrote to his father, "I feel that I have at last found the solution of a great problem and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water and gas is, and friends will converse with each other without leaving home.

That is more than 300 million times faster than the telegraph and 30 billion times faster than horseback.

While earlier generations of wireless technology evolved from voice to data (just as the wired network had), 5G was the first technology to be built from the ground up for the purpose of microcomputers talking to microcomputers.

The railroad, for instance, was "an unnatural impetus to society," one journalist concluded, that would "destroy all the relations that exist between man and man, overthrow all mercantile regulation, and create, at the peril of life, all sorts of confusion and distress.

You thought you were being sold a television, but it turns out that television is selling you.

On average it took 22 days for news to travel between New York City and Charleston; and 26 days to reach Savannah.

Mobile technology makes it possible to be present without being in attendance.

The designated 10-millionth subscriber was a large-animal veterinarian.