“To Communicate Is The Beginning” (1976)
March 22, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink
Really fun 30-minute 1976 AT&T documentary about the profound changes in humankind’s capacity to communicate, beginning in the 1800s with the development of the telephone, and followed by the advent of radio, television, transistors, computers, etc. Features interviews with Orson Welles, Thomas Edison’s former assistant and the granddaughters of Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi, among others. There’s also a brief profile of Elden and Barbara Hathaway, who owned a mom-and-pop phone company in Maine, which was located in their home and was the last hand-crank magneto company to go dial (in 1983). Concerned with history, the film nonetheless has some of the sci-fi futuristic sheen befitting its 1976 release date.
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