The Telephone: A New History

by James Gleick

From the bestselling author of Chaos and The Information, a sweeping history of the instrument that created modern life.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke the words “Mr. Watson―come here―I want to see you” into a contraption he called the telephone, and for the first time a voice was carried along a wire. This feat has long been celebrated as a triumph of individual ingenuity and vision. In fact, the invention was a contest replete with bribery, fraud, and speculation, and no one, not even its inventors, realized what it was good for or how ubiquitous it would become.

Over the next century, the phone would prove less an invention than a continuous revolution. It would teach us new words (starting with the once-unfamiliar “hello” and “goodbye”) and a new way to speak, with instant reaction, instant feeling, instant possibilities. It would create an all-female profession―the operator―that by 1920 outnumbered nurses and waitresses put together. It would enable the skyscraper, the world war, the assembly line, and the multinational corporation. And the Bell System would become the largest monopoly in history: the sole owner of every phone in America. The science that Bell Labs created around the telephone, from pulsing wires to glowing vacuum tubes to the electronic transistor, would usher in the Information Age.

Along the way, the telephone changed human nature. It augmented our bodies, a prosthetic extension of mouth and ear. It gave us the party line, the busy signal, dial tones, wiretapping, the late-night D.J., and the booty call. It magnified the possibilities of government, of business, of friendship, of love.

For a while, the revolution was so successful that it made telephones themselves seem natural, eternal. They settled into the background, on bedside tables, desks, and kitchen walls; in subways and on corners; in novels, movies, songs, and on TV. No one could remember life without them.

Today we are more dependent than ever on little objects called phones, although their ability to make “telephone calls” is incidental. The phone book and the phone booth may be vanishing from memory, but as James Gleick shows, the telephone’s legacy is deeply ingrained―in our networks and our sophistication about networks, in the primacy of information, in the need for connection. Gleick is celebrated for his uncanny ability to make complex ideas vivid, understandable, and concrete. In The Telephone: A New History, he gives us a revelation: a story of technological breakthroughs that is also a universal history of intimate life.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Audiobook, Microhistory

544 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication November 10, 2026

About the author

James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.

Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.

Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )

Reviews

[Victoria Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very, very comprehensive history of the telephone. To be honest, I was less interested in the technical and scientific background, which took up what seemed like the majority of the book, though admittedly the book would have seemed lacking without all that!

I did quite enjoy the deep dive into the "hello girls" (and their typical patriarchal male patrons), and the discussions about the little problems that occurred along the way (how to design a ear/handpiece, how to streamline numbers for long-distance, etc.), but I would have preferred a lighter, more humorous writing style, something akin to Mary Roach or Bill Bryson.

All in all, 3.5 stars, rounded up! Thanks to Farrar, Straus & Giroux via Netgalley, for the ARC!

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the idea of the history of a device from invention to the point where it’s essentially redundant. The role if the phone in cultural history was fascinating - when it began to appear in literature how it employed women and transformed lives. A lot of the technical detail of the race to invent it and then monetise it did become a bit too much and not as interesting as its place in society though.

[Jesse · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the Audiobook ARC!

James Gleick delivers a brilliant, sweeping account in The Telephone: A New History, transforming the history of telecommunication into a narrative that is both intellectually exhilarating and deeply human.

The absolute standout feature of the book is Gleick's extraordinarily clear and complete explanation of how AT&T grew into "Ma Bell"—the sprawling monolith that ultimately dictated American communications for nearly a century. He meticulously traces the company's trajectory, showing how a combination of shrewd patent enforcement, strategic acquisitions, and regulated monopoly status allowed it to construct an unmatched technological empire. Seeing the precise mechanism of how that behemoth was built makes its eventual antitrust battle and breakup by the U.S. government feel like a gripping corporate drama. All in all, Gleick's work is top-tier history.

[L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you only read one history of the telephone (and mass communication in general) from Alec Bell to the 2020s, let this be it. It wasn't always riveting, the way corporate histories mostly aren't, and with it being the history of a monopoly, it was very much a corporate history. But wherever it could, it showed the full landscape around the Bell monolith, and it was fascinating.

Thank you to to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

[Jen Burrows · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comprehensive and compelling, The Telephone is a fascinating scientific and cultural history of an invention that changed the way we communicate. Gleick guides the reader through the discovery, development, global domination and decline of the telephone and the ways it has shaped - and been shaped by - sociocultural forces.

I found Gleick's prose engaging and easy to follow, even as he covers a hefty amount of technical detail. While I sometimes found there was a little too much focus on America and AT&T's corporate history for such a global phenomenon, the story of the telephone is undeniably rooted in capitalism, with the conflict between business and state chartering its development.

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook version but in my head, I’m picturing it the size of a phone book. This was a definitive history of the phone and everything Bell Systems invented. At times, I wasn’t certain I understood things (especially in the transistor section) but otherwise, it’s a good explanation of all that developed from that first phone call in the late 1800s.
I was very surprised that Bell Phones was a monopoly until around 1984 or so. Then it was broken into regional phone companies (still the only player in the area). After that, technology accelerated beyond control. Covid was a time period that pushed the innovation of video calling to the quality it is now, for instance.
I will always have nuggets of info about the telephone from now on.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a really interesting book. It was immediately a flash back to when I learned in elementary school that Columbus didn't actually discover America yet we still pretended he did?
While this does follow Alexander Graham Bell it does make the correction when necessary and goes into great detail about exactly who invented what vs. who was friends with the patent officer. If you are interested in a deep dive into the history of the telephone I definitely suggest this, it really shows how quickly it was always about how can we (the already wealthy) make the most money out of this. It was never about actually making it easier for people to communicate with each other.

[poet · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Read early through Libro.fm's audio arcs for librarians program) This is an incredibly well done history. Interesting and full of facts that blew my mind (who knew about the origin of the term "flappers"!) it was an easy listen that I quite enjoyed!