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Technology’s Retreat: The Decline of Rural Telephony in The United States, 1920-1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Claude S. Fischer
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Extract

One million fewer American farms had telephones in 1940 than in 1920; the instrument was disconnected in at least a third of the farm homes that once had it. Knowing how and why this “devolution” (Mattingly and Aspbury, 1985) occurred can expand our understanding of the social role of technology, diffusion of innovation, and more generally, twentieth-century modernization in America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , Fall 1987 , pp. 295 - 327
Copyright
copyright © Social Science History Association 1987 

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