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Reason
Reason
Thomas W. Hazlett

REVEALED: The rise and fall of ma bell | Vintage Vibes

Alexander Graham Bell AT&T Mark Twain Western Union George Bernard Shaw

The Telephone: A New History, by James Gleick, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 544 pages, $35

Lily Tomlin used to play a character called Ernestine the telephone operator. Dialing "Alexei Kosygin of the U.S.S. of R.," she explained that she was calling from "the A.T. and T." That was "not a country—no, no, we're much bigger than that."

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