Telephone Wires (And The Poles They Rode In On): A Snarled Blight, Or A Wistful Reminder

Living in a small, quaint, historical town, in a time very much akin to the present (okay, the present), MLC is witness to a pretty much constant battle between the forces of progress and the forces that would prefer not to. Given the state of reality, the forces against progress fight at best a slowly losing battle. However, they work hard, mobilize, are vocal, and give ground more grudgingly than the Fellowship at Helm’s Deep. Recently, for example, the ways of the future rolled into town, in the shape of a ‘solar farm’ and offered to set up long-term residence on the site of an old (long capped) town landfill. This array promises to power all town buildings, reduce carbon footprint, and save said town 25M over 30 years. Sound like a no-brainer? Not to the seven residents who live around the perimeter and view it as a massive eye-sore and constant reminder of their distressingly eroded property values.

Town politics, NIMBYism and practicality aside, all the chatter made us wonder, how did we end up with all these telephone poles (and wires) EVERYWHERE, was there any kind of effort against them waged when they first began appearing, and what will happen in the future when we no longer need them.

[It should be disclosed here that MLC is hard at work in the basement lab developing cordless electricity... ]

Our curiosity led quickly to an article published in the Iowa Review (2009 - Eula Bliss), titled ‘Time and Distance Overcome’ which details an early (1876) resistance that more closely resembled bafflement, and included, it seems, Graham Bell’s own financial backers who believed, along with everyone else, that getting the wires in place was even more unlikely than transmitting a voice through them.

By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a “War on Telephone Poles.” Wherever telephone companies erected poles, homeowners and business owners were sawing them down, or defending their sidewalks with rifles. Property owners in Red Bank, New Jersey, threatened to tar and feather the workers putting up telephone poles. A judge found that a man who had cut down a pole because it was “obnoxious” was not guilty of malicious mischief. Telephone poles, newspaper editorials complained, were an urban blight . . .

The city council in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ordered policemen to cut down all the telephone poles in town. And the mayor of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, ordered the police chief and the fire department to chop down the telephone poles there. Only one pole was chopped down before the telephone men climbed all the poles along the line, preventing any more chopping . . .

Despite the war on telephone poles, it would take only four years after Bell’s first public demonstration of the telephone for every town of more than 10,000 people to be wired . . . by 1900, telephones outnumbered bathtubs in America . . .

So in the end, common sense and good old profiteering prevailed and progress progressed, as it tends to do.

But our question is… have telephone poles become a necessary part of the landscape of our time and our consciousness, even to be considered (gasp) a thing of beauty? Probably not, but nonetheless, should they suddenly disappear (once MLC cordless electricity becomes de rigueur) will there be a nostalgic backlash, ‘pole-huggers’ chaining themselves to particularly dear roadside sentinels, festooned with save-our-culture ribbons and bright armbands, marching lockstep and carrying protest signs like ‘Keep your pliers off our wires!’ and ‘Hell no, the poles don’t go!”?

What do you think?

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