Epilogue

Abstract

At a time when wireless communication was conveyed by dots and dashes, the Futurist Edward Bellamy predicted the delivery of music into the home. “Your concerts, for instances, and operas!” Bellamy’s Miss Leete exclaimed in a novel set in 2000. “How perfectly exasperating it must have been, for the sake of a piece or two of music that suited you, to have to sit for hours listening to what you did not care for!”¹ By the year 2000, the choices indeed were many but not from a spectrum that Progressives had in mind.

You stay at home and listen

To the lecture in the hall,

Or hear the strains of music

From a fashionable ball.

—Thomas P. Westendorf, “The Wondrous Telephone”