Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 patent application famously describes the "electrical speech" apparatus that would revolutionize distance communication. Lesser-known is the margin note in his surviving journals: "Device currently receiving interference from unwanted caller (unknown origin)." Historians debate whether this referred to Tesla's experiments or simply the universe's attempt at warning Bell about future bandwidth.

A telephone historian named Margaret Chen, working the archives at the Smithsonian in 2003, discovered a crinkled sketch depicting a rotating dial with numbers labeled "1, 2, URGENT, 3, 4," suggesting someone had been calling repeatedly. The calls stopped abruptly in 1877, leaving no trace except a burn mark on the original handset.

The iPhone's notification system alerts users to three missed calls simultaneously. When the feature debuted in 2007, nobody commented that this mirrored a pattern from 130 years prior. The algorithm was named, ironically, Pathfinder. Some ghosts, it seems, haunt the infrastructure we build.