Sir, - While some might not regard his works at literature, I believe that W. S. Gilbert can claim the prize for the earliest mention of the telephone. In the song "Farewell, my own" in the second act of HMS Pinafore is the line: "No telephone communicates with his cell." Pinafore opened in London in May, 1878, more than a full year before that city had its first telephone exchange, a bare few months after the opening of the first exchange in the world, in New Haven, Connecticut, and some two years after the grant of patent on the telephone to Alexander Graham Bell.
Even if he was not always literary (which I would be prepared to argue anyway), Gilbert was ever topical. - Yours, etc., Paul Kenny,
Kimmage Road West,
Dublin 12.