182 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The bibliographical essay and the footnote references provide an excellent entree to the literature. These include some unpublished dissertations, to which I would add Thomas Jaras, “Promoters and Public Servants: The Role of the British Government in the Expan sion of Submarine Telegraphy (1860—1870)” (Georgetown Univer sity, 1976). Submarine telegraph cables, later supplemented by wireless, pro vided means for immediate international communication of messages for over a century. They have now been replaced by underwater repeaters, fiber optics, microwaves, and satellites. But the games being played with these new technologies are much the same as the ones that Headrick so ably describes. Bernard S. Finn Dr. Finn is a curator in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The subject of one of his exhibits was British submarine cables, and he is coauthor of A Retrospective Technology Assessment: Submarine Telegraphy (San Francisco, 1979). Public Service Liberalism: Telecommunications and Transitions in Public Policy. By Alan Stone. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 296; tables, notes, index. $35.00. A political motivation drives Alan Stone’s examination of American telephone utilities from the 1876 Bell patent until the Communica tions Act of 1934 establishing the Federal Communications Commis sion: “It is the contention of this book that the new conservatism is wrong. Rather, [in public policy] there is an ideology termed public service liberalism . . . that better addresses public problems than the laissez-faire ideology and the sanctimonious muddle that modern liberalism has become” (p. xiii). By directly stating his larger mission, Stone has placed a great burden of proof on his one historical thread: the rise to dominance of the AT&T-Bell system as this nation’s designated telephone utility. That carefully documented story, the centerpiece of this book, makes for a valuable resource in policy studies and business history. The author does not succeed, however, in demonstrating that this particular history ought to serve as a model for present-day policies. Public service liberalism, we are told, is not the philosophy a national government would embrace if it were interested only in fostering the raw efficiency of its private business enterprises. Instead, it is an approach to policy concerned with the promotion of larger social values in addition to productivity. It is most easily applicable to utilities and transportation, where a certain degree of quality access is sought for all citizens. When a particular need for service to society is identified, a government should first examine TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 183 whether an openly competitive marketplace would meet the needs of communities without harm or inequity. If normal market competi tion should prove less than ideal, then the government, either local or federal, may choose to intervene by granting exclusive charters to a single corporation, or limited charters to several, with the provision that certain stipulations (quality of service, coverage or availability, rates) be met. The phrase Stone uses (regrettably) to capture the general approach is a “rebuttable presumption in favor of laissezfaire ” (pp. 14, 21, 23). And finally, when the chosen system is noncompetitive, the government should remain as regulator, defin ing and enforcing standards of service while keeping well clear of actual management. This sounds very much like a generalized description of a public utility corporation monitored by state and municipal regulatory commissions, and for good reason. Stone has taken as his ideal the model of the telecommunications industry before the New Deal. What obtains are some predictable biases in the telling of the history. Thus, Stone offers the patent policy of the Bell system as evidence that the industry was technologically progressive even when enjoying full patent protection in its early years. Other historians, especially David Noble, have painted a far less sanguine picture, showing how AT&T’s aggressive patent policy after the turn of the century blocked potential competition and innovation. AT&T presi dent Theodore Vail campaigned in favor of government regulation of telephony by public utility commissions in 1913, a development that permitted the full realization of a nationwide telecommunica tions monopoly. Stone finds in Vail’s actions a highly enlightened self-interest in the best tradition of public service liberalism. Yet when RCA’s David Sarnoff came...