It has spawned a number of industries (telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, film, recorded sound and music) and vast academic empires in economics and anti-trust law.

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Iranian state radio has reported that Mr Amiri said in a telephone interview from inside the Iranian interest section that he had been "under enormous psychological pressure and supervision of armed agents in the past 14 months".

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Yet privatisation has been taking place: several radio stations and a domestic airline have already been sold, and the telephone company has been partially privatised.

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The way most of these businesses operated was to take an order over the telephone and pass it on to a dispatcher, who then sent a radio message to find a free courier.

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Then we did it again in the 20th century with the convergence of communication and energy: Centralized electricity especially the telephone and then later radio and television became the communication vehicles to manage a more dispersed Second Industrial Revolution, organized around the oil-powered internal combustion engine, suburban construction and the creation of a mass consumer society.

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