Thomas Wheeler > Quotes

“It's only a lost cause when everyone gives up on it.”
― Thomas Wheeler, Cursed

“But as we’ve said before, there is great power in all of us, if only we channel that power into action.”
― Thomas Wheeler, The Arcanum

“Paladin, paladin, choke and twitch, bitten by the Wolf-Blood Witch.”
― Thomas Wheeler, Cursed

“Included in the GSM standard for mobile devices was the ability to use the mobile network's control channel (the parhway that controls the call but doesn't carry the call itself) to send short alphanumeric messages. It was envisioned principally as a means for one-way communication from the company to the subscriber (such as "your bill is due"). That changed when the functionality was discovered by Norwegian teenagers in the late 1980s.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“We know the stories that led us to this moment. We know how actions of those who dealt with history's changes created our today. Now we are in a historic moment of our own, and it's our turn to guide how new technology determines the future.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“As the collected stories of the human journey, history offers the fundamental lesson that the challenges we face today aren't unique. No matter how much we flatter ourselves with self-absorption, we are but the continuation of the human saga.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“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.”
― Tom Wheeler, Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War

“Mobile technology makes it possible to be present without being in attendance.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“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”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“Mr. Watson—Come here” joined “What hath God wrought” in immortality”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“That is more than 300 million times faster than the telegraph and 30 billion times faster than horseback.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“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.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“Ultimately, he decreed that anyone who published a book without prior approval would be excommunicated.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“Watson recorded that he “could unmistakably hear the tones of [Bell’s] voice and almost catch a word now and then.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“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.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“Airtime remittances use mobile minutes as a pseudo-currency that can be transferred between phones and exchanged for goods.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“because organizing “anti” is easier than building “pro.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“In many ways Morse’s ignorance acted to his advantage.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“The technological success of the telegraph failed to drive revenue simply because Americans could not imagine how they could benefit from the breakthrough.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“In the North, however, the wartime absence from Congress of southern representatives had the benefit of eliminating the opposition that had prevented federal aid to expand the railroad westward.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“On July 1, 1862, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing a government program to enable the Union Pacific Railroad to build west from the Missouri River and the Central Pacific Railroad to build east from Sacramento to create the first transcontinental railroad.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“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.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“Contrary to urban legend, the internet was not built as a means of surviving a Soviet attack.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“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.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“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.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“Bezos’s Amazon e-reader broke 550 years of precedent by separating the act of publishing from putting ink on paper.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“Consumers accessing the newly available books often discovered they were farsighted and needed glasses.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“Cyberattacks are a threat to infrastructure. A cyberattack on Ukraine's power grid Iin 2015 left 700,000 people without electricity for hours. In 2013, Iranian hackers attacked a dam outside New York City. In 2016, a U.S. court convicted a Russian of attacks that caused more than $169 million in losses to 3,700 financial institutions.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“It all seems so curious today as 300 hours’ worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future

“But with twenty-four hours of airtime to fill, the fact that the storm had not yet hit was news.”
― Tom Wheeler, From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future