Electricity’s peculiar capacity to divorce space from time was in keeping with other nineteenth century inventions: the telegraph (1830s) sent “messages” across town and later around the world in something like an instant; the telephone (1876) did the same with the voice itself; so, too, the radio (1896) with its wireless communication of sounds and songs everywhere all at once; and the phonograph (1877) with its reproducible, if slower and more material wax and later shellac discs that allowed recordings made in one spot to be heard in quite another.
