There are many ways to reveal one’s age. Not long ago, I was showing my daughter the scrapbook my mother kept of my earliest years. On the front page were several yellowing papers with the logo of Western Union across the top. “What are those?” she asked.
How old am I? I am so old that my birth was acknowledged by telegram.
I explained to her what they were, and that the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel F.B. Morse, was as important and as famous in his day as Steve Jobs is in ours. Both changed the way we communicate with one another, and communication is often the change-agent of a generation. The telegraph, I told her, laughably quaint in an age of literal instant messaging, was in fact the smart phone of the mid-19th century.
