“That's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”

— Rutherford B. Hayes

Reportedly to Alexander Graham Bell after a demonstration of the telephone, as quoted in Future Mind : The Microcomputer-New Medium, New Mental Environment (1982) by Edward J. Lias, p. 2 but author did not footnote or in any other way cite a source for the quotation, and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center has found no primary-source evidence that Rutherford B. Hayes made the comment. The same article erroneously states that President Hayes had his first experience with the telephone in 1876 in a "trial conversation between Washington and Philadephia." Rutherford B. Hayes was president of the United States in the years 1877-1881. His well documented experience with the telephone occurred in 1877 while Hayes was in Rhode Island. Prior to becomng disputed here, this statement was treated as probably spurious in "Obama’s whopper about Rutherford B. Hayes and the telephone" in the Washington Post (16 March 2012) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-whopper-about-rutherford-b-hayes-and-the-telephone/2012/03/15/gIQAel6SFS_blog.html?wprss=fact-checker, which asserts Hayes installed a phone only months later, and that the Providence Journal (29 June 1877) reported his words during the demonstration as "That is wonderful!"
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Rutherford B. Hayes 70

American politician, 19th President of the United States (i… 1822–1893

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