Telephones were once new, and when they were, they were magical. Not in that Jobsian way of being magical, but like, actually a bit touched by the supernatural.”All previous generations, as the result of invariable experience, linked together as an obvious axiom that when the ear could hear the eye must be able to see the speaker. That assumption has been broken down by the telephone,” wrote Fremont Rider in his impressively contrarian book, Are the Dead Alive? in 1909.

read more The Occult and the Telephone – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic.