* Although Sibley was Western Union’s first president, it was a former rival, Ezra Cornell, who first chose the name. Cornell today is remembered less for his involvement in telegraphy than for his establishment of the great mechanical and agricultural university in Ithaca, New York, which bears his name.
* In 1979 N. W. Ayer & Son came up with the slogan Reach out and touch someone for AT&T, in an effort to lessen the public’s wariness toward the telephone. It became one of the most famous advertising campaigns in Madison Avenue history. Almost overnight the late-night ring of a telephone in a Kansas farmhouse went from a fearful “It must be the hospital” to a welcome “That must be Jill!”
* As so often happens, it took some while to find the proper word. The use of the verb to generate, in an electrical sense, appears first in 1895, and when the Times of London illustrated the first recorded use of generating station in 1878, its chosen sentence showed another phrase that was being tested: “The way in which it is proposed to ‘lay on’ electricity to any given district or town is somewhat similar to the arrangements for gas. There would have to be, in the first instance, one or more electrical generating stations.” The secondary phrase survives minimally in British expressions like “Do you have electricity laid on at your place?”
* Edison distributed electricity free at first, in part to work out the teething problems of supply, in part to allow people to become familiarized and then hooked. He made some money from lightbulbs, for which he charged the substantial sum of a dollar apiece. He then started charging for electricity itself in 1883: the first recorded bill went to the Ansonia Brass & Copper Company in January in the sum of $50.44.
* It is not the only means, of course; e-mail, also invented at the Pentagon, first used in 1971, is another.
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers Page 47
