I recently learned that the company named Sprint had an acronym for a name:

Sprint also traces its roots back to the Southern Pacific Railroad (SPR), which was founded in the 1860s as a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Company (SPC). The company operated thousands of miles of track as well as telegraph wire that ran along those tracks. In the early 1970s, the company began looking for ways to use its existing communications lines for long-distance calling.^[22] This division of the business was named the Southern Pacific Communications Company.^[29] By the mid 1970s, SPC was beginning to take business away from AT&T, which held a monopoly at the time.^[22] A number of lawsuits between SPC and AT&T took place throughout the 1970s; the majority were decided in favor of increased competition.^[29] Prior attempts at offering long-distance voice services had not been approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), although a fax service (called SpeedFAX) was permitted.^[30]

In the mid-1970s, SPC held a contest to select a new name for the company.^[31] The winning entry was “SPRINT”, an acronym for “Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony”.^[31]

This is clever. The acronym also hints at the history of the company that was partially born out of railroad operations. The railroad made all sorts of notable changes to the American landscape: it increased the speed of travel for passengers and goods, it connected far-flung places, and it brought activity to new places.

It also enabled other infrastructure. In the case of Sprint, the same right-of-way that carried train traffic could carry messages via telegraph. This substantially increased the speed of communication. Today, we think very little of messages and texts and information flying across geographies in seconds. That same railroad that allowed speeds significantly faster than horses or humans also made space for bits and data to speed around the world.

Put another way, could the online and smartphone world we know today have happened without telegraph and phone infrastructure that provided foundational space for new technology to take advantage of? I do not know the answer to this question but Sprint and other telecom companies made use of existing infrastructure to help bring about new technologies.