When approached with the idea of buying the phone patent from Alexander Gram Bell in 1876, William Orton responded smugly, “What use could this company have with an electric toy?” With a 50 year head start Orton could not see how an actual human voice could take the place of the puzzling system of dots and dashes currently used.
Bell and his financiers had to develop practical uses of his new invention to gain public support. One of the advertisements showed how the master of the household was able to contact the servants straightforwardly. This also allowed servants a direct line to the head of the household which became a terriffic social equalizer. While creating public knowledge, Bell also used the phone as a type of public address system.
Correspondents would phone a radio station many miles away with breaking news from larger metropolitan areas and musicians would use it to play a performance across state lines. Music during the early years of the phone was easier to distinguish because the tones in a performance were more recognizable.
Bell’s vision of the future was one where a centralized office connected multiple subscribers even though, during the earlier years the telephone was connected directly between users utilizing a single line. By 1887, metropolitan areas across the northeastern part of the United States were sheltered with a mess of wirers, connecting the users of this new service, a service which was leased to the public for $20 a year, a price most were not able to come up with at the time.
The switching system made the project more affordable and by 1881, long distance was made available from Boston to Salem.
Bell had a seventeen year patent and when that patent ran out six thousand independent telephone companies came into the market. These small companies could only handle a few hundred subscribers. As these companies fizzled and went into bankruptcy emerging giant AT&T would buy them, thus creating a monopoly.
The difference between the cost of a long distance phone call between the years of 1927 and 1945 varied greatly as the technology improved. In 1927, a three minute call from New York to London was priced at $75, took at least eight operators and fourteen minutes to effect the connection. In 1945, the same call would cost $12 and take only 90 seconds to effectuate, due to improvements in technology.
The phone system conveys much more than just voice conversations today, with the use of faxes and modems. A fax machines scan a document, encodes the pattern of light and dark into digital signals and sends those signals across the phone lines with a built in modem. Modems convert the digital information (binary codes composed of 0 and 1s) into an analog signal that can be sent across the normal phone line. The receiving modem demodulates the analog signal back to a digital signal. On the incoming end of a fax machine, the modem converts back to digital signals that are then printer out, usually on thermo sensitive paper.
Besides the fax and modem, cell phone technology has allowed for mobile telecommunication. This is, naturally, being adapted for mobile computer applications as well. Cell phones started in the early 1980’s. 1 million cell phones were in service in 1987 and quickly increased to 9 million in 1992. Cell phone networks use the normal telephone system that is connected to a computer control center and transmission towers. Computers regulate the amount of the radio spectrum needed to serve the customers. Available frequencies are set aside to make sure that all calls can be handled when a phone is activated. This is based on the assumption that not all the phones will be used at any one time. Two well publicized ventures in the future of portable telecommunication are the satellite networks being developed by giants like Motorola, TCI and Microsoft.