bookmobility

Following the theme of my previous post, this is a fantastic little film strip from 1927 carefully explaining how to use a rotary telephone. Approaching the history of technology, it can be a struggle not to read our own familiarity back onto the past (to really remember how foreign something we take for granted could have seemed). And at the same time, it can be difficult to remember how something that seems obvious or even antiquated now could have been exciting or even threateningly novel. But both of these efforts are incredibly important if we really want to make sense of how information moved—and how people felt about it—in the past.