On Telephones and Architecture

It may sound ridiculous to say that [Alexander Graham] Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture–of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility.

John J. Carty (April 14, 1861—December 27, 1932), first head of Bell Laboratories, 1908