The New Yorker:

By Joseph Epstein

THE Russian peasant Piotyr, in Kishinev in 1910, is so astonished by the telephone, which he has just seen in use for the first time, that he asks his better-educated friend Ivan how this amazing invention works.

“Very simple,” Ivan says. “Imagine a dog so large it stretches from Kishinev to Odessa. You step on the dog’s tail in Kishinev and it barks in Odessa. Do you follow that?”

“Yes, I think so,” Piotyr says, hesitantly.

“Good,” Ivan says. “Now remove the dog.”

The target of this joke is the inherent fragility of analogies and metaphors in reasoning. And a superior joke it is, but I would like it a little better if I myself knew how telephones really work. After reading James Mackay’s admirably concise and lucid biography “Alexander Graham Bell” (Wiley; $30), which gives a careful account of the importance of undulatory current, variable resistance, and electromagnetism to the invention of the telephone, I can make a better pretense of comprehending its functioning. But, in truth, the telephone remains, for me, slightly miraculous. Please return the dog.

Not that my ignorance has prevented me from having two telephone lines and five phones in my apartment, and another phone in my car. Like most people, I suppose, I both love and hate the telephone. I absolutely require it, do not easily imagine life without it, yet resent its intrusion into my life.

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