The telephone

A mere adoption of technology, however, was naturally impossible, since new technical devices always brought new forms of cultural techniques with them. This aspect is also illustrated by our third example, the telephone. Whenever Iranians developed supposedly peculiar ways of using Western technology, the state as well as the concerned middle-class modernists felt the need to redirect its use into the “right” direction, not only in order to prevent mental or physical harm, but also to ascertain an authentic imitation of the foreign example.

The first telephone lines had been installed in Iran already before World War I. In 1923, the basis for a national telephone system was established with the support of the German company Siemens. Fourteen years later, the automatic telephone service was launched, which required the allocation of new, four-digit numbers to every subscriber and brought along the first telephone directory.⁸³ Since the telephone was extremely popular, the demand outnumbered the supply for a long time. When, in 1937, automatic dialling became possible and 3,000 new telephones were put in operation, the enthusiasm of the people in Tehran was great. They were now able to make calls without contacting an operator and going through a switchboard. Immediately, the Ettela ‘at published instructions on how to use the automatic telephones and urged readers to keep their phone calls short so that others could use the phone without difficulty.⁸⁴ But subscribers were so excited that they ignored the instructions and, as a result, frequently dialled wrong numbers or used the telephone so extensively that the whole system was close to collapse. The situation remained completely chaotic for one and a half days.⁸⁵

One reason behind the strong demand was that Iranians had by then discovered the telephone as a new pastime. Talking to someone on the phone had become a leisure activity not only enjoyed by regular subscribers, but also by people who used public or semi-public phones. In the column “social problems” (masa’el-e ejtema‘i), from 1935, one author gives an account of a conversation he had with his friend, who as a shopkeeper also owned a telephone. This friend complained about daily visitors who came to his shop only to call a friend as they were bored of walking alone in the street. By referring to the original purpose of the telephone as a technical device created first and foremost for urgent matters or business affairs, the author of the article makes it clear that such calls were an obvious misappropriation of this helpful technology:

So many people get on our nerves. If they only would make urgent phone calls! [Instead,] they want to play every joke which the telephone has to offer on their friends and fellows. ... We ourselves have to know the [proper] way of using every single device and invention and make use of it in due time.⁸⁶

The author continues by stating that the main benefit of the telephone was to save time; but since Iranians did generally not yet know the value of time, they inevitably used modern time-saving innovations in an improper way.⁸⁷ His criticism is apparently much affected by the idea of an efficient and rationalized way of life, exemplified by the use of modern technology in Western societies. For Iranians this would be impossible to attain as long as they were not even aware of the original purpose behind specific inventions. Consequently, the first step to overcome this obstacle to Iran’s progress was to educate people how to think modern - before actually being modern.

In fact, the call for a rational and sober employment of technological innovations was widespread and not restricted to Iran. But the Iranian modernists were apparently not aware of the global phenomenon that such devices were often used in another way than originally intended by their inventors. The way Iranians used the telephone actually corresponds with international developments of that time, when the telephone started to transcend its original function as a medium for business and turned into a medium of private communication. First emerging in the USA, this trend gradually spread to Europe, where, until the 1920s, the telephone had continued to be regarded as a prolongation of the telegraph or one-way means of communication.⁸⁸

The modernist’s concern was only partly caused by their fear that technological benefits would not materialize, due to possible misappropriation or ill use. As seen already above, their worry owed much to observations made by foreigners which could possibly cement a negative perception of Iran in the world. This fear resurfaces also in connection with the telephone, even though this time it occurs in a reversed way, with a positive account made by a foreigner. When the newspaper announced the launch of the automatic telephone system, it reported how the German engineer who was in charge of supervising the installations in Tehran praised the almost natural talent of the Iranians to put the new telephones to use. By pointing out his international experience, his assessment is presented as particularly reliable:

He was amazed that people became so familiar with the new apparatus in the course of only two or three days and he deemed the grasp and instinct (farasat) of the Iranians praiseworthy and applaudable, seeing that [the people] in foreign countries, while instructions ... were posted in every public place several days before and after the telephones started their service, did not learn the new way of talking as fast as the Iranians did.⁸⁹

How important the foreign perception of Iran was becomes constantly evident in the modernization debate of the 1930s in the Ettelaat, and it is also reflected in a short anecdote reported by Ella Maillart in her travelogue. When Crown Prince Mohammad Reza married the Egyptian princess Fowziyeh in 1939, the Iranian government did not possess enough cars to organize adequate wedding celebrations and, therefore, temporarily confiscated all private cars in Tehran.⁹⁰ Such unusual measures were deemed necessary by the authorities in order to stimulate the country’s image as a progressive nation, since even towards the end of the 1930s Iran’s actual mechanization was not as far advanced as intended. Ironically, technology itself posed a threat to the state’s ambition of presenting a fully modernized country: the cameras of foreign travellers could catch the still existing signs of “backwardness,” like mules and camels transporting goods, which continued to be quite common in the 1920s.⁹¹ As a consequence, police officers were instructed to prevent foreigners from photographing manifestations of “backwardness” like ruined buildings or camels,⁹² and, as part of the state’s virtual obsession with regulations, special photographing licenses (javaz) were issued as well. Walter Hinz obtained such a javaz and translated the regulations, printed on the back of the license in Persian, for future travellers to Iran. According to these regulations, it was prohibited to photograph military facilities and to take pictures that offended taste and decency or damaged national prestige. Photographs of streets, boulevards, newly constructed as well as renovated historical buildings, however, were explicitly permitted.⁹³

With such regulations the Iranian state could of course exert only rather limited influence on Iran’s image abroad, which presents itself as quite diverse in the travelogues from the 1920s and 1930. The way in which foreign visitors actually perceived the country depended to a large extent on the author’s personal attitude towards modernization and imitation of the West. For those who came to Iran in search of traditional forms of living or historical architecture, it was quite sobering to witness the spread of cars and electricity. One of them was Ella Maillart, who passed through Iran in 1939 on her way to Afghanistan, where she intended, together with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, to explore an almost unknown nomadic tribe. Her principal reservations against the benefits of Western progress as well as her general scepticism about a blind adoption of technical innovations are displayed in her account of Tabriz:

Arg, or citadel, is a wrong name for the great wall we had ascended: built under Ghazan Khan at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it is the ruin of the Mosque Ali Shah which must have had one of the biggest vaults that have ever been built. ... Below, at the far end of the open courtyard, spotless in daylight stood a huge cinema screen. Below us where the arched mihrab stood once to indicate the direction of the sacred Mecca, was throned the fire-proof cabin of a cinema-projector, new god, and bestower of oblivion to our mass civilisation.⁹⁴

Other travellers, however, were more favourably disposed towards the undertaken reforms and shared the state’s technocratic view on transforming the country and its society. They gave enthusiastic reports on the advancement of road building and the rationalization of the public sphere.⁹⁵ But even these authors, who were sympathetic to Iran’s rapid modernization, found it especially worthwhile to mention such uses of technology that differed from the “standard” Western ways. Consequently, travelogues constitute a valuable source of information on how technical devices were actually used by common Iranians, and they highlight the fact that technology was never adopted in a cultural vacuum. Instead, technology was adopted in ways that best served the specific demands of the local society. The Austrian geographer Gustav Stratil-Sauer, for example, describes an image that must have been quite common at that time in and around Mashhad: an automobile with a coffin strapped onto the hood or running-board, bringing a deceased to his or her last resting place next to Imam Reza. These automobiles had gradually replaced the former camel caravans, the so-called “caravans of death” feared for the scent of decay after their at times week-long journeys.⁹⁶ When Stratil- Sauer gives an account of trucks whose cargo deck was used for passenger transportation, he noted especially the preservation of the traditional sex segregation that was guaranteed by spanning a rope in the middle of the loading space, thus separating the women’s from the men’s space.⁹⁷ A palpable example of foreign amazement at the influence of local climate and environmental conditions on the perception of technology is finally given again by Ella Maillart:

I found the explanation of something that had been puzzling me since 1937. Many lorries dragged a thick chain between their front wheels as if escaping from prison. The chain was meant to prevent an accumulation of electricity on cars whose shiny bodies have for hours rubbed against the fast, compact wind of these flinty and calcinated highlands: a shock might hurt the first man to step down from a vehicle overcharged with electricity.⁹⁸