author

Walter Kellogg Towers

b. 1888

A brisk early-20th-century writer and editor, he is best remembered for turning the story of modern communication into an engaging narrative for general readers. His best-known work follows the rise of the telegraph, telephone, and wireless as inventions that reshaped everyday life.

1 Audiobook

Masters of Space Morse and the Telegraph; Thompson and the Cable; Bell and the Telephone; Marconi and the Wireless Telegraph; Carty and the Wireless Telephone

Masters of Space Morse and the Telegraph; Thompson and the Cable; Bell and the Telephone; Marconi and the Wireless Telegraph; Carty and the Wireless Telephone

by Walter Kellogg Towers

About the author

Born in Chicago on August 8, 1888, Walter Kellogg Towers was an American author and editor. The basic biographical details consistently available for him are limited, but library and public-domain records agree on his lifespan, ending with his death on February 17, 1931.

Towers is best known for Masters of Space (1917), a lively popular history of long-distance communication. In that book, he traces the work of figures such as Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and Guglielmo Marconi, presenting the telegraph, cable, telephone, and wireless as part of one larger story about people learning to connect across distance.

His surviving reputation today rests mainly on that readable blend of history, technology, and biography. Because so little verified personal information is easy to confirm, his work remains the clearest window into the subjects that interested him most: invention, communication, and the dramatic changes they brought to the modern world.