The Wire Age | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 14, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 19.

The Wire Age.

In history, says an exchange, we have the golden age, the iron age, the age of brass, and other periods similarly marked. Future annalists may well describe the present period of our history as the wire age. In no part of the economy of our daily lives are we divorced from wire. It is our slave, and yet an ever-present master. Sleeping, we repose on wire mattresses. Eating, we see foods which have passed through sieves, and which are sheltered from insect appetite by wire covers. Calling, we pull wires to ring curled-wire gongs. Traveling, we are conveyed by cable or electric railways, hoisted by elevators hung on wires, and hurried over wire bridges. We announce our coming by telegraph or telephone wires, and we thread our way by night through streets lighted by means of electric cables. Across our fields are strung millions of miles of barbed wire. Our clocks are set by wires, our watches are run by wires, our books are stitched with wires, our pictures hung by wires, and our politics managed by “wires.”