Francisco, on the Prairies, and in Dublin. Curiously, the newspaper of that time saw the telephone as a rival to the press as PA. system, such as radio was in fact to be fifty years later. But the telephone, intimate and personal, is the most removed of any medium from the PA. form. Thus wire-tapping seems even more odious than the reading of other people's letters. The word "telephone" came into existence in 1840, before Alexander Graham Bell was born. It was used to describe a device made to convey musical notes through wooden rods. By the 1870s, inventors in many places were trying to achieve the electrical transmission of speech, and the American Patent Office received Elisha Gray's design for a telephone on the same day as Bell's, but an hour or two later. The legal profession benefited enormously from this coincidence. But Bell got the fame, and his rivals became footnotes. The telephone presumed to offer service to the public in 1877, paralleling wire telegraphy. The new telephone group was puny beside the vast telegraph interests, and Western Union moved at once to establish control over the telephone service. It is one of the ironies of Western man that he has never felt any concern about invention as a threat to his way of life. The fact is that, from the alphabet to the motorcar, Western man has been steadily refashioned in a slow technological explosion that has extended over 2,500 years. From the time of the telegraph onward, however, Western man began to live an implosion. He began suddenly with Nietzschean insouciance to play the movie of his 2,500-year explosion backward. But he still enjoys the results of the extreme fragmentation of the original components of his tribal life. It is this fragmentation that enables him to ignore cause-and-effect in all interplay of technology and culture. It is quite different in Big Business. There, tribal man is on the alert for stray seeds of change. That was why William H. Whyte could write The Organization Man as a horror story. Eating people is wrong. Even grafting people into the ulcer of a big