Want to Guess When the First Telephone Appeared in Literature?

Over the past few months the Times Literary Supplement’s NB column has been engaged in one of its periodic musings about the earliest appearance of this or that modern wonder in literature. Last spring, the column got into a nearly weekly discussion of the earliest poetic reference to motoring. In late summer, the column turned to the telephone in literature, first positing Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1892 novel The Wrecker as the literary debut of the polite request, “May I use your telephone?” Subsequent columns reported that readers had pushed back the first appearance of a telephone in literature (but not of that specific quote), to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of the Four, then to May 1878, with a lyric in Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore.

The NB columns stuck in the mind, and they ever so faintly resonated when, on October 14, the BBC Archive tweeted a video from a children’s program in 1976, commenting: “#OnThisDay 1976: Blue Peter showed off a phone with no cable that you could even take outside. It’ll never catch on.”

In the BBC video, one of the hosts holds up what looks like a phone receiver mounted on a shoulder bag. “Now this portable telephone is the invention of an American scientist, Mr. Lew Schnurr, and he’s a teacher at the Chelmer Institute in Chelmsford, Essex,” he says, pulling the hood of his rain jacket over his very 1970s hair as he walks outside to make a miraculously wireless call. “And he said he doesn’t see any reason why in the future it wouldn’t be possible for just about everybody to be walking around carrying one of these—their own portable communication set.”

Never mind the work by Motorola and Bell on wireless telephony well before 1976—what is the earliest reference to a portable phone in literature? It is probably the earliest literary reference to a telephone of any kind, and it sinks the HMS Pinafore by two months, appearing in Mark Twain’s short story for the Atlantic Monthly in March 1878, “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton.”

At that point, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent was only 24 months old, but Twain ran with the possibilities. He tells the story of Alonzo Fitz Clarence, “in his snug and elegant little parlor,” on a “venomously cold” night in Eastport, Maine, wearing “a lovely blue silk dressing-gown.” Frustrated by a balky clock and wanting to know the time, Alonzo “sat down at a rose-wood desk, leaned his chin on the left-hand edge of it, and spoke, as if to the floor.”

He begins chatting with his Aunt Susan, and Twain, without mentioning a telephone, gradually reveals that she is elsewhere—there is three hours’ difference between them, and Aunt Susan reports that the weather is “warm and rainy and melancholy.” Alonzo hears in the background a young woman singing “In the Sweet By and By.” He “listened a moment,” Twain writes, “and said in a guarded, confidential voice, ‘Aunty, who is this divine singer?’”

Alonzo and Rosannah Ethelton, who is staying with his aunt for a month, talk deep into the night. Only after the conversation ends do we learn where she is, when Alonzo says (cue Tony Bennett): “How wonderful it is! Two little hours ago I was a free man, and now my heart’s in San Francisco!”

The first coast-to-coast phone call wouldn’t actually be placed until 1915, but the transcontinental connection was hardly Twain’s only tech vision in the story. Music piracy, wiretapping and encryption come up when one Sidney Algernon Burley, also in love with Rosannah, assumes a false identity and travels from San Francisco to Maine intent on wrecking the blossoming romance. Posing as a clergyman visiting Eastport, Burley calls on Alonzo and mentions in passing that he has invented an improved telephone.

“At present,” Burley-as-clergyman says, “a man may go and tap a telegraph wire which is conveying a song or a concert from one state to another, and he can attach his private telephone and steal a hearing of that music as it passes along. My invention will stop all that.”

Alonzo is unimpressed: “Well,” he says, “if the owner of the music could not miss what was stolen, why should we care?” Here Twain’s prescience fails him. When the story was published, recorded music didn’t exist—Thomas Edison was four months away from inventing the phonograph. Napster was a long way off.

Clergy-Burley replies: “Suppose that, instead of music that was passing along and being stolen, the burden of the wire was loving endearments of the most private and sacred nature?”

Twain writes: “Alonzo shuddered from head to heel. ‘Sir, it is a priceless invention,’ said he; ‘I must have it at any cost.’”

That provides an opening for the imposter, who keeps returning to the house as they await the delayed delivery of the invention (like the reverend, it’s also a fake). One day when his host isn’t around, Burley gets on the phone with Rosannah, pretending to be Alonzo, and insults her singing, saying: “Try something modern” She’s indignant, and shortly thereafter dumps a flabbergasted Alonzo. He eventually discovers Burley’s role in the breakup, but by then brokenhearted Rosannah has fled San Francisco.

Alonzo vows to find her. His plan? To roam the country with a “portable telephone,” hoping to discover Rosannah singing “In the Sweet By and By,” her go-to song when she’s sad. Twain sketches a 19th-century version of trying to find a cell signal or wifi for your smartphone in the barren countryside: “Time and again, strangers were astounded to see a wasted, pale, and woe-worn man laboriously climb a telegraph pole in wintry and lonely places, perch sadly there an hour, with his ear at a little box, then come sighing down, and wander wearily away.” Sometimes the onlookers entertained themselves as they would when they saw a balloonist in a gondola overhead: They took potshots at the guy up on the pole: “Thus his clothes were much shredded by bullets and his person grievously lacerated. But he bore it all patiently.”

Eventually, after a recuperative pit-stop in a “private mad-house,” Alonzo is telephonically reunited with Rosannah, who is in Honolulu. (Hawaii wouldn’t be linked to the U.S. mainland by telegraph until 1903; the first submarine telephone cable to the mainland was connected in 1957.) The two get married without ever having met in person, the wedding performed by reverends at each end of the line. Newspaper announcements in New York and Honolulu both begin: “MARRIED.—In this city, by telephone . . .”

Twain’s imagining of the telephone’s implications so soon after its invention reflected his general fascination with new technologies that were reshaping life in the second half of the 19th century. As noted in the invaluable Mark Twain Encyclopedia, edited by J.R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson, “He was a prolific investor in the new inventions that were dumped upon the public in the scientific frenzy of the age. A short list of speculations include[s] a steam generator, a steam pulley, an envelope maker, a machine telegraph, an engraver, a carpet pattern machine, a special telescope, plasmon (a food additive), and an advanced cash register.”

But he was hardly a reflexive cheerleader for technology. Twain’s initial enthusiasm gave way to a deep uneasiness about the implications of the machine age. His 1889 time-travel novel, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” might be a send-up of Merry Olde England and the knights of yore, but it’s also a bleak indictment of industrialization visited upon the bucolic past, with electric fences, buried explosives, and the slaughter of thousands. Twain had even soured on the telephone by then—“Confound the telephone, anyway,” says the engineer-protagonist. “It is the very demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of divergence from similarity of sense.”

The novel was a dozen years removed from “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” when Twain seemed amused, even charmed, by the telephone’s possibilities.