and today time and space are as if they were not, and from sea to sea our subjects of thought are as one. It was but yesterday that half our world knew not how the other half lived: now both halves read the same items at breakfast.

…the early telegraphers were planters for Graham Bell, and the telephone came to carry the word of man afar, and the graphophone to perpetuate it forever, and thus to complete the annihilation of space and time as obstacles to the diffusion and unification of intelligence.

—W J McGee, Fifty Years of American Science, September 1898: via Atlantic Monthly.