| The history of communication - 1849/1876 - The telephone |
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| Written by Damien Lanfrey | |||
| Friday, 07 September 2007 | |||
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The telephone As with many innovations, the idea for the telephone came along far sooner than it was brought to reality. While Italian innovator Antonio Meucci is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device in 1876. Bell began his research in 1874 and had financial backers who gave him the best business plan for bringing it to market.  In 1877-78, the first telephone line was constructed, the first switchboard was created and the first telephone exchange was in operation. Three years later, almost 49,000 telephones were in use. In 1880, Bell merged this company with others to form the American Bell Telephone Company and in 1885 American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) was formed; it dominated telephone communications for the next century.
By 1900 there were nearly 600,000 phones in Bell's telephone system; that number shot up to 2.2 million phones by 1905, and 5.8 million by 1910. In 1915 the transcontinental telephone line began operating. By 1907, AT&T had a near monopoly on phone and telegraph service, thanks to its purchase of Western Union: the government began to investigate the company for anti-trust violations, thus forcing the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment AT&T agreed to divest itself of Western Union and provide long-distance services to independent phone exchanges. After World War I, when government nationalized telephone for 1 year, the systems were returned to private ownership and its monopolistic hold, and by 1934 the government again acted allowing to operate a "regulated monopoly" under the jurisdiction of the FCC. This stayed in effect until AT&T's forced divestiture in 1984. AT&T's local operations were divided into seven independent Regional Bell Operating Companies, known as the "Baby Bells." AT&T became a long-distance-services company. By 1948, the 30 millionth phone was connected in the United States; by the 1960s, there were more than 80 million phone hookups in the U.S. and 160 million in the world; by 1980, there were more than 175 million telephone subscriber lines in the U.S. In 1993, the first digital cellular network went online in Orlando, Florida; by 1995 there were 25 million cellular phone subscribers, and that number exploded at the turn of the century. People raved about the telephone's positive aspects and ranted about what they anticipated would be negatives of the telephone. Their key points, recorded by Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book "Forecasting the Telephone," mirror nearly precisely what was later predicted about the impact of the internet. For example, people said the telephone would: help further democracy; be a tool for grassroots organizers; lead to additional advances in networked communications; allow social decentralization, resulting in a movement out of cities and more flexible work arrangements; change marketing and politics; alter the ways in which wars are fought; cause the postal service to lose business; open up new job opportunities; allow more public feedback; make the world smaller, increasing contact between peoples of all nations and thus fostering world peace; increase crime and aid criminals; be an aid for physicians, police, fire, and emergency workers; be a valuable tool for journalists; bring people closer together, decreasing loneliness and building new communities; inspire a decline in the art of writing; have an impact on language patterns and introduce new words; and someday lead to an advanced form of the transmission of intelligence. Privacy was also beginning to become a major concern. Yet, the invention of the telephone also worked to increase privacy in many ways. It permitted people to exchange information without having to put it in writing. President Rutherford B. Hayes to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 on viewing the telephone for the first time: “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”
 written by jameal, August 25, 2009 there sould be more information but that was good but not wat im lookin 4   written by Amber, December 08, 2009 What is the name of the phone written by Angry tiger, February 02, 2010  rawr |
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 19 December 2007 ) | |||
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