Hoy! Hoy! Mushi-Mushi! Allo!

By LANCE MORROW

When Mel Brooks' 2,000-Year-Old Man was asked to name the greatest invention in the history of the world, he answered without hesitation: "Saran Wrap." A nice try, but wrong. The greatest invention in the history of the world was -- is -- the telephone.

The telephone is a commonplace item on a much-wired planet. The idea of being able to throw your voice around the world and in a few seconds hit precisely the ear you wanted among all the globe's 10 billion ears has lost its capacity to surprise. But the telephone has strange powers. The sudden little Ice Age that descended upon AT&T last week may have given some Americans, in an almost subliminal way, a dose of the metaphysical spooks.

One hundred fourteen years ago, Bell's instrument began the electronization of the earth. The telephone system has amounted to the first step toward global mental telepathy. The telephone and its elaborations (computer modems, fax machines and so on) have endowed the planet with another dimension altogether: a dissolution of distance, a warping of time, a fusion of the micro (individual mind) and macro (the world). Charles de Gaulle declined to have a telephone, undoubtedly because he had already fused micro and macro -- Le monde, c'est moi.

With the telephone, reality began to dematerialize and go magic, < disintegrating here to recombine over there. Information began riding around the world on electricity. The abrupt disconnection of such a familiar yet mysterious faculty, the telephone, must be profoundly unsettling -- like a glimpse of a dead world, a premonition of absolute cold.

The telephone is one of those miracles one can discuss in terms either sacred or profane. (The same is true of babies.) The phone is of course a mere home appliance and business tool, and by the standards of the 21st century, a primitive one. To bring electronic mysticism to the telephone may seem something like illustrating the wonders of flight by discussing pigeons.

If you think of the telephone purely as a secular voice thrower, it arrives in the mind at its most irritating. For example, no one has yet devised a pleasant way for a telephone to come to life. The ring is a sudden intrusion, a drill in the ear. Pavlov's dog hears and picks the damned thing up. The Satanic bleats from some new phones are the equivalent of sound lasers. Don't hurt me again, says the dog. I'll talk. Perhaps the phone that looks like a duck decoy and quacks instead of ring will breed new species -- phones that bark or baaa or moo or, maybe, sound like distant summer thunder.

But the ring cannot be subtle. Its mission is disruption. The phone is the instrument we were issued for a march into the age of discontinuity. The telephone call is a breaking-and-entering that we invite by having telephones in the first place. Someone unbidden barges in and for an instant or an hour usurps the ears and upsets the mind's prior arrangements. Life proceeds in particles, not waves. The author Cyril Connolly wrote lugubriously about the sheer intimacy of intrusion that a telephone can manage. "Complete physical union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide -- and yet not quite real, for it stops when the telephone rings."

Something about telephones is obscurely comic, related to some manic vaudeville. In your fist you clutch to the ear an object that looks ignominiously like the shining plastic cousin of a shoe. Designers have produced more streamlined models, but an essential ungainliness is inescapable. It results partly from the pressing of technology against anatomy. The technosmooth circuitry is pushed bizarrely against the old Darwinian skull. The talker's being comes unfocused from the visual immediate room and refocuses -- through the ear! -- elsewhere. The Here communes with There through sudden activations of breath, vocal cords, jawbone, tongue, lips, eyes, emotions. Through the thing held to the ear, we hear voices from another world. We would be amazed by this spectacle if we were not so used to it.

In 1886 a poet named Benjamin Franklin Taylor caught both the metaphysics and, unintentionally, the comedy when he wrote this rhapsody to the phone: "The far is near. Our feeblest whispers fly/ Where cannon falter, thunders faint and die./ Your little song the telephone can float/ As free of fetters as a bluebird's note."

Alexander Graham Bell thought the telephone should properly be answered by saying, "Hoy! Hoy!" -- an odd term from the Middle English that became the sailor's "ahoy!" and reflected Bell's sense that those speaking on early telephones were meeting like ships on a lonely and vast electronic sea. The world has now grown electronically dense, densest of all perhaps among the Japanese, who answer the phone with a crowded, tender, almost cuddling, quick- whispered mushi-mushi. The Russians say slushaiyu (I'm listening). The hipper Russians say allo. Italians say pronto (ready). The Chinese say wei, wei (with a pause between the words, unlike the Japanese mushi-mushi). Wei, wei is meaningless, except as a formula to answer the phone.

Why is the telephone the greatest invention in the history of the world? Forget its existential oppressions (the disruptions, the discontinuities of mind, or, if you want to look for trouble, the horrifying thought of the sheer obliterating noise that would be made if all the telephone conversations of the earth at a given moment were audible at once). All of that is nattering. The telephone, with the fluidities of information that it has enabled, has proved to be a promiscuously, irrepressibly democratic force, a kinetic object with the mysterious purity to change the world. The telephone, like the authority to kill, might have been legally restricted to kings and dictators. But it is in a way the ideal instrument of freedom -- inclusive, unjudging, versatile, electronic but old-fashioned (here so long no one really fears it). The telephone, like democracy, is infinitely tolerant of stupidity; it is a virtual medium of stupidity, a four-lane highway of the greedy and false and brainless. But it is (unless tampered with) a faithful channel of words from mouth to distant ear, mind to mind, and that is, absolutely and exactly, the meaning of freedom.