Mark Twain On the Phone

Mark Twain describes an astonishing (to him) thing: hearing a person make a telephone call.

Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, -- a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don't hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can't make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says...