Reach out and touch some moose...

I know almost nothing about the so-called "telephone." Yet today I bought one using my (anticipated) Economic Stimulus Package $600. Thanks GeeDubb... As far as I can tell that's the only thing your sorry presidency has ever done for me. In truth, I had been planning to put my 6 Benjamins towards my crushing credit card debt, just as the Fed feared I would. But hell, I thought this morning, first I'll swipe my credit card, then I'll wait a few weeks for my stimulation to arrive. That way everybody wins! Seems very American, no? So I bought an iPhone and a 2-year contract. And here's what I learned via 10 minutes on Wikipedia about the proud heritage of my new gizmo:

A brief timeline of historic spoken telecommunications events:

1844-1875... various Europeans tinker with "speaking telegraphs"

1875-77(ish). Americans Bell, Gray, and Edison file patents up the wazoo for various telephone-y devices... a complex story, best glossed in blogs...

1981... AT&T ("American Telephone & Telegraph" until 2005 for crying out loud) launch famous add campaign slogan "Reach out and touch someone."
As a kid, Ian, hearing this phrase, would puzzle over how it seemed not quite the right thing to say about telephones... very little touching going on, the way Ian understood them...

2000... Now twenty-year-old Ian goes to Berkeley with little black cellular phone that his mom gave him. Played "Snake" alot on it. Called home dutifully around midterms or finals... (pers. comm. - data not found on Wikipedia). Subsequently discarded and forgotten for the better part of a decade.

2008... After years of flak from family and acquaintances who would allegedly call if the opporunity were there, Ian buys the absolute apex of telephone evolution, the iPhone. Drives to the spruce forest he optimistically considers his future cabin, and makes some phone calls to family and friends, and incidentally, while talking inside his truck, comes closer to living moose than ever before in his life. Takes pictures with iPhone camera while speaking on speaker phone. What Hath God Wraught? (oops, wrong gizmo...)

2009... to infinity and beyond...