The web and Twitter lit up earlier today when President Obama, poking fun at some Luddites, quoted one of his predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, who supposedly said about the telephone: "It's a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?"People began pointing out that President Hayes never said that. And he is actually credited with having installed the first White House telephone.
Some interesting background to President Obama's joke is that he may have gotten the story about Hayes from the recent best-selling biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson. The book relates the story of a 1985 speech lauding Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in which the same comment about President Hayes and the telephone was made by President Ronald Reagan.
Incidentally, President Hayes served before every presidential comment came under a microscope, but he faced his own skeptics. He came into office after the notorious election of 1876, which was widely assumed to have been stolen. And though he had been a war hero and was by most accounts a fine person, he was mocked as "Rutherfraud" B. Hayes and "His Fraudulency."
Photograph: President Rutherford B. Hayes/Library of Congress
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