Off the hook

"...guitar sounds are on their way out..."
- Dick Rowe, executive of Decca Records about the Beetles.

"Television won't matter in your lifetime or mine."
- Rex Lambert, Radio Times editor in 1936

I believe similar words of discouragement were blasphemously and infamously uttered when Alexander Graham Bell was attempting to launch his invention of the telephone. And it was a turbulent beginning fof the cell phone as well.

Today, I sit in my apartment, miles away from home, divided by ocean, land and time. But my family and friends always seem close by. The Internet helps undoubtedly. But the phone calls are the real highlight. Hearing a loved one's voice in real time allows you to naively believe that they are just a few houses down from your own. As I'm talking, I can visualise the signals and the long elegant paths they travel to make my voice heard so far away.

Where would be without these inventors who fought to realise their dreams? Depending on letters that would take weeks to arrive and broaden the chasm that inevitably settles comfortably between two entities that are forced into a lack of communication.

I like being able to call home. I like receving calls from friends. There will be plenty more inventors who will meet narrow-minded obstacles. I only hope that they step over them like pebbles in order to make their genius available to the world.

Until then, I'll bask in the fact that Mr. Bell and I share an alma mater.