Marcel Proust, who was a subject of photography after dying, was taken with telephony during life. The opening of Clara Byrne’s Forbes piece about the novelist’s relationship with this disruptive technology:

“‘The telephone, a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or order an ice cream,’ wrote Marcel Proust in his much discussed but less read novel In Search of Lost Time. So what can a dead French novelist tell us about new technology? As it turns out, the answer is quite a lot.

Proust was a keen observer and user of new technologies from the telephone to the motorcar and plane, all of which came into common usage over the lifetime of his epic novel. The author even subscribed to a service which allowed members to listen to plays and concerts over the phone, a sort of 19th century Netflix but he is at his sharpest on the social impact of that new communication technology known as the telephone.”