Time and Distance Overcome

927 Words4 Pages
Time and Distance Overcome Whenever a new thing is invented people are always skeptic about it, because it’s something unfamiliar and somehow unsafe. How come we are scared of new things at to try new things, most of the great ideas work out as miracles, most of them. In the essay “Time and Distance Overcome”, by the American non-fiction writer, Eula Biss, you see the miracle of the telephone Biss writes “"And I believed that the telephone itself was a miracle." And why wouldn’t it be a miracle, look where it has brought us today. But what was the real story behind the telephone and the telephone poles? In the shocking essay “Time and Distance Overcome” Eula Biss have chosen to write about the story about the telephone, by mixing the essay genre with facts. She writes about the deaths of the black Americans in the late 1800 century and early 1900’s. In the essay genre it is well known for having personal and reflecting touches upon it. And that is not shown very much in Eula’s essay, here it is hidden and the personal opinion is not the main theme in text. The only time we really see Biss’s opinion is in the ending. The essay is divided into three different parts. Two main parts and one short part. The first two parts are made of facts about the creation of the telephone – but with two very different sides of the story. But mutual in both of the first two part is the changing in mood and focus throughout. And because of that you get the feeling that these two parts don’t quite belong together. The first part is describing the history of Alexander Graham Bell and his presentation of the very first telephone and how much trouble he had to overcome to publish what he had invented. People did not like the idea of poles and wires all around them, so here began the so called “War of the Telephone Poles”, people tried to stop new poles from being raised
Open Document