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Superbloom:
Nikola Tesla, in an 1898 interview about his plan to create a wireless telegraph, said that he would be "remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war."? Not to be outdone, his rival, Guglielmo Marconi, declared in 1912 that his invention of radio would "make war impossible.", AT&T's top engineer, J.J. Carty, predicted in 1923 that the telephone system would "join all the peoples of the earth in one brotherhood."* In 1932, the popular technology writer and future RCA vice president Orrin Dunlap said that television would "usher in a new era of friendly intercourse between the nations of the earth."
Such cheery predictions were put to an early test in the summer of
1914. In the immediate aftermath of the June 28 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, hundreds of urgent diplomatic messages raced between European capitals through recently strung telegraph and telephone wires. As the historian Stephen Kern has described, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. Rather than calming the crisis, they inflamed it.