Telephone History
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012With six billion people on the planet today using some form of telephone, it is probably the most widely used piece of technology in the world.
The invention of the telephone is often attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, who in 1876 was the first to obtain a patent on a sound transmitting “apparatus.” But truth be told, many other inventors had been working on similar technologies ever since the 1830’s.
The same year that Bell got his patent on the telephone, a Hungarian engineer named Tivadar Pusks created the telephone switchboard, an essential component for the creation of a telephone network.
From the 1870’s until the 1890’s, telephones were sold in pairs that would be connected over a distance for personal or business use, e.g. between a factory and the residence of its owner.
The creation of a telephone network through the use of switchboards began in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1894. The operators were almost exclusively women, and for the next half-century, this was how all long-distance phone calls in the United States were relayed.
The ability to place direct long-distance phone calls was introduced only in 1951, when eleven cities across the U.S. were assigned “area codes.” Those cities were: Boston (617), Chicago (312), Cleveland (216), Detroit (313), Milwaukee (414), Oakland (415), Philadelphia (215), Pittsburgh (412), Providence (401), Sacramento (916), and San Francisco (318).
Since this introduction of area codes and automatic long-distance calling in the 1950’s, technical advances were made and signal transmission became digitized (as opposed to analogue) but the way we used telephones remained pretty much unchanged for four decades. Only in the 1990’s did VoIP get introduced, and Mobile Phones experience their boom.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
The most recently invented major telephone technology is called VoIP, which stands for “Voice over Internet Protocol.” VoIP was invented in 1994 by Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty. However, the technology could not be put to practical use until the first software was released by VocalTec in 1995.
Dozens of companies today offer VoIP telephone services at low cost compared to traditional landlines; two of the most successful being Vonage and Skype.
While extraordinarily price competitive, three disadvantages commonly mentioned with VoIP phone services are, 1) You cannot make emergency calls (911) through your VoIP service, 2) Your number will be unlisted, which may make you more difficult to find, 3) Your phone will not function when there’s a power outage.
Mobile Phones
Mobile phones experienced an explosion in popularity in the 1990’s, driven by lower cost and expanded networks. However, it may surprise you to know that the first successful mobile phone took place in 1946, from a car in St Louis, Missouri.
Ten years later, the first automatic car phone was introduced in Sweden. That contraption, constructed with vacuum tubes and relays, weighed close to 90 lbs.
Even though the technology transmit phone calls wirelessly is old, the use of cell phones did not take off in earnest until the 1990’s. At the end of the 1980’s, only one in seventy Americans use some kind of mobile phone, and many of those were the kind installed into automobiles. Ten years later, the number of American mobile phone users had jumped to one in three. Take another leap to the year 2011, and the number of cell phone subscriptions surpassed the population; which means that on average, every American now uses a mobile phone.
Worldwide today, there are 5.9 billion mobile phone subscribers out of a world population of 7 billion. Compare that to a mere one and a quarter billion landline telephones. The mobile phone revolution is complete.
With a background as a translator, writer and publisher, Kent J Davidsson currently works in the utilities and communications field. For quotes on communication services, including phone, Internet and television, please write to his team via e-mail write to@lower-utility-bills.us.