ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 3, 1997 TAG: 9702040016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MANUEL MENDOZA KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
A PBS documentary about the telephone? Some viewers may think they'll need a wake-up call when it's over.
Not so. Most of us can't help but take for granted a device as ubiquitous as Alexander Graham Bell's ``harmonic telegraph.'' But in the hands of Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman (Chimps: So Like Us), the telephone's invention and rapid insinuation into American life makes for fascinating television.
In just an hour, ``The Telephone'' packs in so much detail and context that it feels like a suspense thriller (it airs tonight at 9 on WBRA-Channel 15). The whole story is here, freshly recounted.
Not only do Simon and Goodman succinctly outline each of the telephone's technical breakthroughs, but they also penetrate the contrasting personalities of Bell and his partner, Thomas Watson. Mini-histories highlight the often hysterical evolution of the phone operator and the ultra-serious business competition that led to coast-to-coast phone service.
``You could only use certain phrases: `Number, please' and `Thank you,''' says former operator Marie McGrath, one of many interviewees who put a human face on ``The Telephone.'' ``The customer could say anything they wanted to you ... `You're a stinker' ... and you would say, `Thank you.'''
In addition to the usual documentary mix of vintage black-and-white photos and newly shot film meant to re-create the past, the filmmakers have unearthed meticulous period drawings of Bell's technical blueprints and early phone designs. And they generously excerpt footage of Watson reading his memoirs, a 1947 film called Bell, and silent movies that launched the phone into popular culture.
Factoids also are used dramatically: A section about rapid technological advances peaks with the disclosure that by the turn of the century, there were more phones in American homes than bathtubs.
A few scholars are equally insightful, particularly author and Watson descendant Susan Cheever, who grins like a Cheshire cat and gets a sparkle in her eyes every time she talks about the telephone.
Mark Twain's contentious remarks about the box he both owned and despised provide comic relief.
``The human voice carries entirely too far as it is,'' he said. ``We have been hollering `shut up' to our neighbors for centuries and now you fellows come along and seek to complicate matters.''
``The Telephone,'' which airs tonight on PBS, is the first part of The American Experience's ``technology trilogy.''
The following week Big Dream, Small Screen tells the story of Philo T. Farnsworth, the farm boy who first envisioned television, but lost credit for it to more savvy businessmen. The series ends the next Monday with New York Underground, a history of the first subway lines.
``Inventors then were sort of like rock stars,'' Cheever says. ``It was the age of enlightenment. Everybody thought there was a reason for everything, that we could figure it out and that our problems were at an end.''
``The Telephone,'' narrated in inviting tones by Morley Safer, traces its subject from Bell's germ of an idea in 1876 to the spread of phones to 11 million homes by 1910.
Along the way, we learn that the phone was part of a ``climate of invention'' - within a 35-year period in the late 19th century, Americans also came up with the lightbulb, the refrigerator, the electric streetcar, barbed wire, the typewriter, the skyscraper and the horseless carriage.
While Bell was demonstrating the first telephone at the Centennial celebration in Philadelphia - causing such a stir that police thought the building had caught on fire - nearby booths held a Pittsburgh pickle merchant named Heinz pouring the first ketchup and a local pharmacist proudly sharing a new drink with the public: root beer.
Without making judgments, Simon and Goodman don't ignore the downside of the phone, either: the ruthless competition, the mistreatment of the operators, the urban blight and deforestation caused by the erection of thousands of telephone poles.
``It is my heartwarming and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us - the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage - may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss,'' Mark Twain said, ``except for the inventor of the telephone.''
LENGTH: Medium: 80 linesby CNB