While the telephone had lifted him from poverty, made him famous, and won him the respect of the world’s most accomplished scientists, it had also robbed him of what he valued most: time. Bell had always believed in the telephone, not just its inventiveness but its usefulness. But even he had not anticipated how quickly and widely it would be embraced. “I did not realize,” he would admit years later, “the overwhelming importance of the invention.”
Alexander Graham Bell.
