From A Nervous Splendor (1979), by Frederic Morton:
“If his subjects’ electrical frivolities frustrated the Crown Prince, so did their attitude toward the telephone. Rudolf admired the telephone’s use abroad, not least its facilitation of stock-market-business between widely separated cities. Particularly in America this let more and more of the common people participate in transactions heretofore limited to millionaires.
In Rudolf’s own country, though, the telephone could not seem to become a democratic utility. Austrians treated it like a rococo bauble. This summer long-distance service began between Vienna and the suburb of Baden near Mayerling. Calls were limited to ten minutes, of which at least six were taken up by delicious arabesques of protocol.
“Fräulein Operator in Baden?” said Fräulein Operator in Vienna.
“Might I have the honor to wish you a good morning? It is my privilege to establish a connection on behalf of His Excellency, the Privy Councillor Alfons Baron von Wieck, who presents his compliments. His Excellency would be grateful for the pleasure of conversing with …””
From the Smallweed column of The Guardian of Sat 4 Aug 2001:
“It seemed a safe bet that it would not be long before someone came up with Freud’s telephone number and sure enough someone has. It was HAM (for Hampstead) 2002. Sigmund, you may remember from this column last week, when 43 was allotted the Vienna telephone number 14362. Aha! he said to himself (I paraphrase, but not much). The number 43 is my present age. So the 62 which follows must be the age at which I am doomed to die. He was troubled enough to write to Jung about it. Just as well he wasn’t living in Hampstead at 20. He might have feared dying at two.”
Paul Roazen wrote in the Autumn 1978 issue of VQR:
“In their convictions Orwell and Freud had far more in common than one might suppose. Both were superlative rationalists who felt their intelligence oppressed by the weight of human stupidity. Religious belief seemed to them a particularly noxious species of nonsense. Politically, Orwell and Freud shared a suspicion of American power. Although Orwell made much more of his concern at the dangers inherent in machines, in his daily life Freud rarely relied on the use of the telephone; for both of them letter-writing was an art as well as a necessity. Although Freud was far older, born in 1856 instead of 1903, each came to feel that World War I marked a watershed after which the universe was barer and more dilapidated.”
John Dyer posted at j.hn on November 28, 2008:
“Freud had some great observations about how the technology of his day (wired telephones and railroads) were affecting his world. This quote summarizes his feelings:
“If there had been no railway to conquer distance, my child would never have left town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice.”
I love how Freud encapsulates one of today’s most fascinating phenomena: we create technology to help solve problems created by technology. This seems to beautifully capture the human condition.
(Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961, p. 38.)”
From A Nervous Splendor (1979), by Frederic Morton:
“”Fräulein Operator in Vienna?” Fräulein Operator in Baden said.
“The party whom I have the honor to serve at this end of the wire, University Professor Dr. Dr. Alois Zechner,* would like to convey to you and to your party a hand kiss for the courtesy of awaiting the completion of this connection. Fräulein Operator, if it is still convenient for His Excellency the Privy Councillor Baron von Wieck to entertain the connection, Herr Professor Dr. Dr.
Zechner would be only too deeply pleased…”
The rococo kept rolling over the telephone during the warm months of 1888. Not everybody shared the Crown Prince’s impatience over it. Why hurry? This new season ahead, this newfangled autumn wasn’t here yet. In fact, right now fall seemed further off than ever. The rain stopped, the sun shone, and July flowed so radiantly into August that one might think that August would, with the same ease, flow back into July. One floated through a summer of reprieve.
It was during this reprieve that Dr. Freud added a day to his Alpine weekends with his family at Maria-Schutz. He picked mushrooms, climbed past fragrant dwarf larches to the Schneeberg peak, enjoyed the view of the Vienna Woods, and for once let the Grub Street deadlines for that medical dictionary go hang…
* (sic) In Austria, to this day, in addressing an academician, each of his doctorates is separately mentioned.”