My dissertation is a history of the telephone industry in North America, from the invention of the telephone in 1876 to the completion in the 1920s of a continental telephone network. The story takes place in both the United States and Canada, the first two nations to embrace the telephone; the approach is comparative and transnational. The dissertation is anchored by a close comparison of the telephone’s development in Central Canada and the American Midwest, but it steps back from these regional case studies to tell a story that spans the continent.

In 1929 the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published Middletown, their classic study of life in one ordinary American city. The Lynds began their book with a catalog of the many technological changes that had arrived in the lifetime of one elderly “Middletown” resident: the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, electricity, radio, airplanes, and automobiles.“Middletown” was in fact Muncie, Indiana, and the unnamed resident was William Harrison Kemper. An amateur scholar of Muncie himself, Kemper had written his own history of the town twenty years before, at the very start of the twentieth century. In it, he linked the inventions listed by the Lynds to broader