Clubhouse, Spotify, and the invention of talking Today's best articles Daily business briefing Solving COVID newsletter It was only a short while after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876 that people started to wonder if the whole "talking to each other" thing was really such a good idea. "It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage ⦠may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss," Mark Twain wrote in an 1890, "except the inventor of the telephone."