By 1930, roughly 41 percent of American families owned a telephone and the vast majority of these subscribers were middle-class. Although telephone companies encouraged people of all classes and professions, not least farmers, to adopt the device, a poster like this one emphasizes the value of the telephone to the kind of customer who has a car and eats out at restaurants that require reservations. And in general, with the expansion of domestic and business telephone use during the early decades of the 20th century, telephone advertising promoted an increasing variety of uses for the new-fangled contraption beyond its original, largely emergency function.