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pushed the costs even lower, resulting in the traditional telephone being a fixture in most houses in the United States, and the cell phone being cheap enough to give to a teenage child.

The two devices have also enabled other technologies to exist and flourish. The traditional telephone laid an infrastructure of copper wires sending electrical signals across the world. Innovators have used these wires to allow people to send faxes and pictures, and communication between computer networks. In particular, this network of computer networks grew to become the Internet. The technology driving cell phones, transmitting electrical signals through the air to anyone, anywhere, has enabled people to send and receive text messages and emails from remote locations or use a Global Positioning System (GPS) to know exactly where they are.

The traditional telephone and the cell phone have together ushered an era of communication never seen before. The traditional phone allowed people to communicate in a natural fashion, and the cell phone allowed this to happen whenever or wherever they desired. This ability raises the question though, of whether this is necessarily a good thing. Do people want to be contactable, no matter what the circumstance? As Mark Twain wrote, upon the invention of the traditional telephone, "The human voice carries entirely too far as it is...and now you fellows come along and seek to complicate matters."

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