Any Number Can Play

Sir:

Congratulations on your telephone cover [Feb. 23]! TIME's keen view of our No. 1 monopoly should be required reading for all teachers and lawmakers. It's time we realized that our business giants are giving us more and more for less and less.

DEIGH D. BOYD

South Laguna, Calif.

Sir:

The telephone is a Jekyll and Hyde invention, a curse and plague as often as it is a convenience. We list our present lack of a telephone as our greatest luxury. We no longer must drop whatever we are doing, day or night, and run to answer that raucous bell. I now have leisure to pursue a hobby, enjoy good music, read a book or converse with my wife. We are not dragged off against our will to meetings. We no longer must put up with the leechlike telephone salesmen and solicitors. Meanwhile, our health is better as we have eliminated one of the prime sources of emotional stress in 20th century life.

JOE W. RUESS

Grass Valley, Calif.

Sir:

In your article on the telephone, you mention "more than 600 patent lawsuits" in which Bell was involved before his patents expired. May I call to your attention one particular lawsuit, that of Antonio Meucci, 1808-1889, a native of Florence, Italy, who claimed the invention of the telephone?

LINO S. LIPINSKY

Director

The Garibaldi and Meucci Memorial Museum

Staten Island, New York

Sir:

At Tufts University, Dr. Amos Emerson Dolbear is credited with having invented the telephone, and with having made the first telephone call in history.

CECELIA VANAUKEN

Medford, Mass.

Sir:

Wouldn't it have been appropriate and also interesting to tell the readers of TIME that a German, Philipp Reis (1834-1874), invented the telephone in 1861?

ERNST R. MILLER-KLINKMULLER

Berlin

Sir:

You missed the opportunity to mention that there is a question whether Alexander Bell or Elisha Gray was the inventor of the telephone.

DANA D. CORROUGH

Stockton, Calif.

¶ The claims of Meucci, Gray, Reis, Dolbear and numerous others were all fought out in the courts. The Bell patents were upheld in 1888 by the U.S. Supreme Court.—ED.

Sir:

We with telephone number 4-1617 are curious to know how this number was selected by Artist Artzybasheff for your cover.

JOHN MCLENDON

Jackson, Miss.

He picked it right off his own phone in Lyme, Conn.—ED.

Sir:

Could someone install a device on the common variety of telephone which will inform the telephone user, even though he is on the phone, when someone is trying to contact him ? Perhaps a light could flash, a buzzer buzz, or even a small shock be provided for those who still refuse to give up the line when someone is desperately trying the number.

NORMAN GOLDNER

Minneapolis

¶ The cost would be prohibitive. And, notes A. T. & T., consider the chewed fingernails when a telephone user ends a conversation in response to such a signal—and is not called back.—ED.

Sir: