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This timeline is provided to assist bear witness how the dominant form of communication changes equally apace as innovators develop new technologies.

A brief historical overview: The printing press was the large innovation in communications until the telegraph was adult. Printing remained the primal format for mass messages for years subsequently, but the telegraph allowed instant communication over vast distances for the first fourth dimension in man history. Telegraph usage faded every bit radio became easy to utilize and popularized; as radio was being developed, the telephone quickly became the fastest way to communicate person-to-person; after television receiver was perfected and content for it was well developed, it became the dominant grade of mass-communication technology; the internet came next, and newspapers, radio, telephones, and television are being rolled into this far-reaching information medium.

Development of the Telephone
Earth Changes Due to the Telephone
Telephone Predictions

The Evolution of the Telephone

Every bit with many innovations, the idea for the telephone came along far sooner than it was brought to reality. While Italian innovator Antonio Meucci (pictured at left) is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854, Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device in 1876. Bell began his inquiry in 1874 and had financial backers who gave him the all-time business organization plan for bringing it to market.

In 1877-78, the start telephone line was constructed, the outset switchboard was created and the first telephone commutation was in performance. Three years afterwards, about 49,000 telephones were in use. In 1880, Bong (in the photo below) 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 adjacent century. At one point in time, Bong Arrangement employees purposely denigrated the U.S. telephone system to bulldoze down stock prices of all phone companies and thus go far easier for Bell to acquire smaller competitors.

Past 1900 there were virtually 600,000 phones in Bell'southward telephone system; that number shot upward to 2.ii million phones by 1905, and five.8 million past 1910. In 1915 the transcontinental telephone line began operating. Past 1907, AT&T had a almost monopoly on phone and telegraph service, thanks to its buy of Western Marriage. Its president, Theodore Vail, urged at the time that a monopoly could most efficiently operate the nation'south far-flung communications network. At the urging of the public and AT&T competitors, the government began to investigate the visitor for anti-trust violations, thus forcing the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment, an understanding between AT&T vice president Nathan Kingsbury and the function of the U.S. Chaser General. Under this commitment, AT&T agreed to divest itself of Western Matrimony and provide long-distance services to independent phone exchanges.

During World War I, the government nationalized phone and telegraph lines in the Us from June 1918 to July 1919, when, later a joint resolution of Congress, President Wilson issued an social club putting them under the direction of the U.Southward. Mail service Function. A year later, the systems were returned to individual buying, AT&T resumed its monopolistic hold, and by 1934 the government over again acted, this time agreeing to allow it to operate as a "regulated monopoly" under the jurisdiction of the FCC.

Public utility commissions in country and local jurisdictions were appointed regulators of AT&T and the nation'southward independent phone companies, while the FCC regulated long-distance services conducted across land lines. They fix the rates the phone companies could charge and determined what services and equipment each could offering. This stayed in effect until AT&T's forced divestiture in 1984, the conclusion of a U.S. Department of Justice anti-trust accommodate that had been filed in 1974. The anointed company had become popularly known and disparaged as "Ma Bong." AT&T's local operations were divided into vii independent Regional Bell Operating Companies, known as the "Baby Bells." AT&T became a long-altitude-services company.

By 1948, the 30 millionth phone was connected in the United States; by the 1960s, at that place were more than 80 one thousand thousand telephone hookups in the U.S. and 160 1000000 in the world; by 1980, there were more than 175 million phone subscriber lines in the U.S. In 1993, the first digital cellular network went online in Orlando, Florida; by 1995 in that location were 25 million cellular telephone subscribers, and that number exploded at the turn of the century, with digital cellular phone service expected to replace land-line phones for virtually U.Due south. customers by equally early as 2010.

World Changes Due to the Telephone

Inside 50 years of its invention, the telephone had get an indispensable tool in the U.s.. In the late 19th century, people raved about the telephone's positive aspects and ranted about what they anticipated would be negatives. Their primal points, recorded by Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book "Forecasting the Telephone," mirror well-nigh precisely what was subsequently predicted nigh the bear upon 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 than flexible piece of work arrangements; change marketing and politics; alter the ways in which wars are fought; cause the mail service to lose business organization; open up new job opportunities; allow more than public feedback; make the world smaller, increasing contact between peoples of all nations and thus fostering earth peace; increment crime and aid criminals; exist an help for physicians, police force, burn, and emergency workers; exist a valuable tool for journalists; bring people closer together, decreasing loneliness and building new communities; inspire a refuse in the fine art of writing; have an impact on linguistic communication patterns and introduce new words; and someday lead to an advanced form of the transmission of intelligence.

Privacy was also a major business organisation. As is the case with the Cyberspace, the telephone worked to better privacy while simultaneously leaving people open to invasions of their privacy. In the beginning days of the telephone, people would often have to journey to the local general shop or some other fundamental bespeak to exist able to make and receive calls. Nigh homes weren't wired together, and eavesdroppers could hear you conduct your personal business concern equally you lot used a public phone. Switchboard operators who connected the calls would too regularly invade people's privacy. The early house-to-firm phone systems were often "party lines" on which a number of families would receive calls, and others were gratuitous to mind in and often chose to do so.

Today, while virtually homes are wired and people tin can travel freely, conducting their telephone conversations wirelessly, wiretapping and other surveillance methods can be utilized to listen in on their individual business organisation. People's privacy can too exist interrupted past unwanted phone calls from telemarketers and others who wish to profit in some way – simply every bit Internet e-mail accounts receive unwanted sales pitches, known as "spam."

Yet, the invention of the telephone too worked to increase privacy in many ways. It permitted people to exchange data without having to put it in writing, and a call on the phone came to replace such intrusions on domestic seclusion as unexpected visits from relatives or neighbors and the pushy patter of door-to-door salesmen. The same could be said for the Net – privacy has been enhanced in some means because email and instant messaging have reduced the frequency of the jangling interruptions previously dished out past our telephones.

Past Predictions Near the Future of the Phone

President Rutherford B. Hayes to Alexander Graham Bong in 1876 on viewing the telephone for the first time:

"That's an astonishing invention, simply who would always want to use i of them?"

Bong offered to sell his telephone patent to Western Union for $100,000 in 1876, when he was struggling with the concern. An business relationship that is believed by some to exist apocryphal, but still recounted in many telephone histories states that the committee appointed to investigate the offer filed the post-obit study:

"We do not see that this device will be always capable of sending recognizable oral communication over a distance of several miles. Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their 'telephone devices' in every urban center. The idea is idiotic on the face of information technology. Furthermore, why would whatsoever person desire to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a articulate written message sent to whatsoever large metropolis in the United States? … Mr. G.Thousand. Hubbard's fanciful predictions, while they sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than than a toy … This device is inherently of no use to u.s.a.. We do not recommend its buy."

Equally reported in the book "Bell" by Robert Five. Bruce, Kate Field, a British reporter who knew Bong, predicted in 1878 that eventually:

"While 2 persons, hundreds of miles apart, are talking together, they will actually see each other."

Sir William Preece, chief engineer for the British Post Part, 1878, as reported in "The Telephone in a Changing Earth" by Marion May Dilts:

"There are atmospheric condition in America which necessitate the use of such instruments more than than hither. Here nosotros take a superabundance of messengers, errand boys and things of that kind … The absenteeism of servants has compelled America to adopt communications systems for domestic purposes."

AT&T principal engineer and Electrical Review writer John J. Carty projected in his "Prophets Column" in 1891:

"A arrangement of telephony without wires seems i of the interesting possibilities, and the distance on the earth through which it is possible to speak is theoretically limited only by the curvation of the world."

Carty also wrote:

"Someday we will build upwards a globe phone system, making necessary to all peoples the use of a mutual linguistic communication or mutual understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one alliance. In that location volition be heard throughout the globe a great vocalisation coming out of the ether which will proclaim, 'Peace on earth, good will towards men.'"

In the 1912 article "The Future Dwelling house Theatre" in The Independent, South.C. Gilfillan wrote:

"In that location are two mechanical contrivances … each of which bears in itself the ability to revolutionize amusement, doing for information technology what the printing printing did for books. They are the talking motion picture show and the electric vision apparatus with telephone. Either one will enable millions of people to see and hear the same operation simultaneously .. or successively from kinetoscope and phonographic records … These inventions volition go cheap enough to be … in every home … You volition have the home theatre of 1930, oh ye of little organized religion."

View history of other information technologies:

<Telegraph><Radio><Phone><Television> <Net>

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Source: https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/time-capsule/150-years/back-1870-1940/

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