How Apple is like Old Hollywood
In the 1930s, AT&T tried to crush an invention dreamed up by the engineer Clarence Hickman – one that would come to be essential to its telephones and to our lives. “The secret machine in Clarence Hickman’s office was an answering machine,” said Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. “It was fully functioning and about six feet tall.” It took the answering machine decades to enter American homes because, Wu said, AT&T decided it was bad for phones. “I’m not sure where …
