Sci&Tech History

In a column entitled “March of the Engineers,” the humorist and social critic Rusell Baker lamented the complexity and sophistication of his office’s new telephone system. Not only did everyone have to attend classes for instruction in how to use it, but such features as call forwarding seemed to Baker to be taking technology too far: he wanted to be able to travel to distant place and not have his telephone calls follow him around the world. Baker closed his column by defining the new telephone system as “another bleak example of the horrors created when engineers refuse to leave well enough.”

Rusell Baker is not the only observer of late-twentieth-century technology who has lamented a new telephone system. In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman wrote that “the new telephone systems has proven to be another excellent example of incomprehensible design.” Indeed, elaborate push-button telephone systems provide a virtual paradigm for

Norman’s inquiry into modern devices that “add to the stresses of life rather than reduce them.” He could “count upon finding bad example” of a system whereever he traveled, and many of the anecdotes he relates ring true to anyone who has gone through the trauma of adapting to a new instrument on the desk(Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things).What Baker and Norman about technology, especially about the new telephone system, in the other hand, help people to connect with each other rather to make an agreement, deal or transaction possible. Something that we never imagine before. How we deal with the new telephone system is similar with the duality of knife. For cooking sake, knife is very useful, but in the hand of a bad guy, a knife will became a hardfull tool.

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