HISTORY37 - Telephones

This article is about the history of the telephone, the most widely used telecommunications device in the world.   Billions of telephones are in use today.

The article will cover the invention of the telephone; the growth of telephone service; the telephone’s evolution from dial, to touchtone, to cordless; and the transition to mobile phones, including cell phones and smart phones; and a look at how today’s phones have changed our lives. 

 

I have a particular interest in this subject because my Uncle, Douglas Ring, was directly involved in the invention of the cell phone.

Principal sources for this article include: “History of the Telephone,” nationalitpa.com; “How the Telephone Was Invented,” thought.com; “Telephone,” britatnnia.com; “How Your Cell Phone Came to Be,” ringbrothershistory.com; and numerous other online sources.

Before Telephones

Before the invention of electric telephones, mechanical acoustic devices existed for transmitting speech over short distances. The acoustic tin can telephone, or "lovers' phone,” has been known for centuries.  It connects two diaphragms with a taut string or wire, which transmits sound by mechanical vibrations from one to the other along the string.  The classic example is the children's toy made by connecting the bottoms of two paper cups, metal cans, or plastic bottles with tautly held string.  Additionally, speaking tubes have long been common, especially within buildings and aboard ships, and they are still in use today.

 

A 19th-century acoustic tin can telephone.

Invention of the Telephone

During the 1870s, research on designing a practical telephone was being conducted in the U.S., Germany, Hungary, and Italy.  In 1876, two well-known American inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray (founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company), independently designed devices that could transmit sound along electric wires.  Both devices were registered at the U.S. Patent Office on February 14, 1876.   History records that Bell’s lawyer got his paperwork filed first.  There followed a bitter legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell subsequently won.

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His family were leading authorities in elocution and speech correction, and Bell was groomed and educated to follow a career in the same specialty.  His thorough knowledge of sound and acoustics helped immensely during the development of his telephone, and gave him the edge over others working on similar projects at that time.  He was a man always striving for success and searching for new ideas to nurture and develop.

 

Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell invented and patented the first practical telephone.

The electric telephone emerged from improvements of the electric telegraph, developed in the U.S. by Samuel Morse in 1838.  The telegraph and telephone are very similar in concept, and it was through Bell's attempts to improve the telegraph that he found success with the telephone.

The telegraph had been a highly successful communication system for about 30 years before Bell began experimenting. The main problem with the telegraph was that it used Morse code, and was limited to sending and receiving one message at a time, made up of dots and dashes.  Bell had a good understanding of the nature of sound and music. This enabled him to perceive the possibility of transmitting more than one message along the same wire at one time.  Bell’s solution, the "Harmonic Telegraph," was based on the principal that musical notes could be sent simultaneously down the same wire, if those notes differed in pitch.

Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson continued to work on the harmonic telegraph, but by the summer of 1874, were developing an idea to create a device that could transmit the human voice electrically.  By June 1875, their experiments had proven that different tones would vary the strength of an electric current in a wire.  They then built magnetic coil membranes to produce a working transmitter capable of varying electronic currents and a receiver that would reproduce these variations in audible frequencies.

On March 7, 1876, Bell was awarded U.S. patent 174,465. This patent is often referred to as the most valuable ever issued by the U.S. Patent Office, as it described not only the telephone instrument but also the concept of a telephone system.

Three days later, on March 10, 1876, Bell spoke through his telephone instrument to his assistant Watson, who was in the next room, and said "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to speak to you."  Watson heard Bell and with that, the first telephone call had just been made.

The first public demonstrations of the telephone followed shortly afterward. One of the earliest occurred in June 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Further tests and refinement of equipment continued.  On October 9, 1876, Bell conducted a two-way test of his telephone over a wire of two-mile length between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On October 9, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell conducted a two-way test of his telephone over a two-mile distance between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

On January 30, 1877, Bell was granted another patent, this time for an electromagnetic telephone using permanent magnets, iron diaphragms, and a call bell.

The poor performance of early telephone transmitters prompted a number of inventors to pursue further work in this area.  Among them was Thomas Alva Edison, whose 1886 design for a granulated carbon voice transmitter was sufficiently simple, effective, cheap, and durable that it became the basis for standard telephone transmitter design through the 1970s.

The early history of the telephone became, and still remains, a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified by the huge mass of lawsuits to resolve the patent claims of many individuals and commercial competitors. The Bell and Edison patents, however, were commercially decisive, because they dominated telephone technology and were upheld by court decisions in the United States.

Telephone Service Expands

Alexander Graham Bell founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.  As the industry rapidly expanded, Bell quickly bought out competitors.  After a series of mergers, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), encompassing the Bell Telephone Company, was incorporated in 1880.  In 1875, Elisha Gray had sold his interests in the Western Electric Manufacturing Company to Western Union.  In 1879 Western Union withdrew from the telephone market and AT&T acquired Western Electric in 1881.   Because Bell controlled the intellectual property and patents behind the telephone system, AT&T had a de facto monopoly over the young industry.  In 1911, AT&T acquired the Western Union Telegraph Company in a hostile takeover and the two eventually merged.  AT&T would maintain its control over the U.S. telephone market until 1984 when a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice forced AT&T to end its control over state markets.

Telephone Networks and Exchanges.  Telephone service expanded rapidly.  In 1878, telephone service between Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, was established.  Service between New York and Chicago started in 1892 and between New York and Boston in 1894.  Transcontinental service began in 1915. 

Early telephones were leased in pairs to subscribers. The subscriber was required to put up his own line to connect with another.

From the earliest days of the telephone, it was thought that it would be more practical to connect different telephone instruments by running wires from each instrument to a central switching point, or telephone exchange, than it was to run wires between all the instruments.  Telephone exchanges were soon developed to provide telephone service for a small area by interconnecting and switching individual subscriber lines for calls made between them, eliminating subscribers having to have direct lines. This made it possible for subscribers to call each other at homes, businesses, or public spaces.  Telephone exchanges made telephony an available and comfortable communication tool for many purposes, and it gave the impetus for the creation of a new industrial sector.

The telephone exchange was an idea of Hungarian engineer Tivadar Puskás in 1876, while he was working for Thomas Edison on a telegraph exchange.  On January 28, 1878, the first commercial telephone exchange was opened with 21 subscribers at New Haven, Connecticut, in a storefront of the Boardman Building.  George W. Coy designed and built this first switchboard, that could connect as many as 64 customers.  Still, it was limited as only two conversations could be handled simultaneously and six manual connections had to be made for every call.

The manual switchboard was quickly extended to hundreds of lines. Each line was terminated on the switchboard in a socket (called a jack), and a number of short, flexible circuits (called cords) with a plug on both ends of each cord were also provided.  Two lines could thus be interconnected by inserting the two ends of a cord in the appropriate jacks.  By 1904, over three million phones in the U.S. were connected by manual switchboard exchanges.

 

A manual switchboard in an American city, c. 1900.

In 1889, Kansas City undertaker Almon B. Strowger invented a switch that could connect one line to any of 100 lines by using relays and sliders. The Strowger switch, as it came to be known, was still in use in some telephone offices well over 100 years later.

Strowger was issued a patent on March 11, 1891, for the first automatic telephone exchange. The first exchange using the Strowger switch was opened in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892.  Initially, subscribers had a button on their telephone to produce the required number of pulses by tapping, but this was quickly replaced with another Strowger invention, the rotary dial, for which Strowger was granted a patent in November, 1892. While used in telephone systems of the independent telephone companies, rotary dial service in the Bell System in the United States was not common until the introduction of the “candlestick” desk set in 1919. (See below)

Telephone Book.  The first telephone book was published in New Haven in February, 1878.  It was one page long and held 50 names; no numbers were listed, as an operator would connect you. The page was divided into four sections: residential, professional, essential services, and miscellaneous.  After 1879, subscribers began to be designated by numbers and not their names.

In 1886, Reuben H. Donnelly produced the first Yellow Pages-branded directory featuring business names and phone numbers, categorized by the types of products and services provided.  By the 1980s, telephone books, whether issued by the Bell System or private publishers, were in nearly every home and business. But with the advent of the Internet and of cell phones, telephone books have been rendered largely obsolete. 

Payphones.  In 1889, the first coin-operated telephone, invented by William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut, was installed and used in the Hartford Bank. Unlike pay phones today, users of Gray's phone paid after they had finished their call.  Payphones proliferated along with the Bell System.  By the time the first phone booths were installed in 1905, there were about 2.2 million phones; by 1980, there were more than 175 million.  But with the advent of mobile technology, the public demand for payphones rapidly declined, and today there are fewer than 500,000 still operating in the United States.

Long Distance.   As the distances between telephone instruments began to increase beyond those served by local exchange offices, a technical problem arose that had not been experienced in earlier telegraph systems.  Telephone signals could be transmitted only a fraction of the distance of telegraph signals, because of the greater attenuation in iron and steel wires of the higher frequencies of telephone signals.  Copper wire greatly improved the situation, but manufacturing techniques produced brittle wire that was not self-supporting over the spans between poles.  The problem was solved in 1877 with the invention of hard-drawn copper wire. In 1884, the first test of hard-drawn copper wire for long-distance telephone service was conducted between New York City and Boston.

Telephone communication across countries as large as the United States was not possible without additional amplification. A mechanical amplifier, which made use of an electromagnet receiver and a carbon transmitter, was installed in a commercial circuit between New York City and Chicago in 1904, but it was not until the patenting of the vacuum tube by Lee de Forest in 1907 that truly transcontinental telephone communication was possible.  In 1915, the first transcontinental line, between New York City and San Francisco, was placed in service.

 

Map of the first transcontinental telephone line with details of the first transcontinental call between ceremonial speakers, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, which took place on January 25, 1915.

Partly Lines.  Party line systems, where a telephone line is shared with multiple subscribers, were widely used to provide telephone service, beginning in the late 1800s, although subscribers in all but the most rural areas probably had the option to upgrade to individual line service at an additional monthly charge.  The service was common in sparsely populated areas where remote properties were spread across large distances.

Party lines provided no privacy in communication. They were frequently used as a source of entertainment and gossip, as well as a means of quickly alerting entire neighborhoods of emergencies, such as fires, and became a cultural fixture of rural areas for many decades.

The rapid growth of telephone service demand, especially after World War II, resulted in a large increase in party line installations in the middle of the 20^th century in the United States. This often led to traffic congestion in the telephone network, as the line to a destination telephone was often busy. Other objections about party lines included one party monopolizing a multi-party line and eavesdropping on calls.  By the 1980s, party lines were removed in most localities.

Evolution of the Dial Telephone

The telephone instrument continued to evolve over time, as can be illustrated by the succession of AT&T telephone instruments described below.

The earliest telephone instrument to see common use was introduced by Charles Williams, Jr. in 1882.  Designed for wall mounting, this instrument consisted of a ringer, a hand-cranked magneto (for generating a ringing voltage in a distant instrument), a hand receiver, a switch hook, and a transmitter.  Various versions of this telephone instrument remained in use throughout the United States as late as the 1950s.

AT&T wall-mounted phone, 1907

The evolution of dial telephones through the 1960s is shown in figure below:

 

AT&T dial telephones changed dramatically between 1919 and the 1960s.

Free standing desk telephones were introduced in 1919, beginning an era of rotary phones which would span the rest of the 20^th century. The tall profile of AT&T's desk set shown above, led many people to call them “candlestick” phones.

In 1927, AT&T introduced the first telephone to use a handset. The ringer and much of the telephone electronics remained in a separate box, on which the transmitter-receiver handle was cradled when not in use. 

The first telephone to incorporate all the components of the station apparatus into one instrument was the so-called combined set of 1937.  Some 25 million of these instruments were produced until they were superseded by a new design in 1949.

The 1949 desk telephone was totally new, incorporating significant improvements in audio quality, mechanical design, and physical construction.  From 1949 until 1953, only black desk telephones were manufactured. The introduction of telephones in color occurred in several stages from 1954 until 1957, as manufacturing capability was refined and material selection processes were perfected.

Prior to the introduction of the Princess phone in 1959, most households had only one telephone set, usually located in the living room or other central location. The princess phone's small size and lighted dial were designed to make it attractive as a bedside extension and the Bell System marketed it as such.

The last standard rotary-dial telephone to be produced by AT&T was the Trimline, introduced in 1965.  The Trimline's dial was located in the handset itself, with the ringer and electronics within the telephone's base. The base was made in two variations: one for a desk set, and the other for wall mounting.

Overseas Transmission

Terrestrial Radio.  The extension of telephone service to other countries and continents was a goal set in the earliest days of telephone systems. In North America, service to Canada and Mexico was a natural extension of the long-distance methods used within the United States, but transmission across the ocean to Europe called for a significant amount of ingenuity.

While transatlantic telegraph cables had been in service since 1866, these same cables could not be used for voice transmission, because of bandwidth limitations. Instead, the first transatlantic telephone service made use of radio. Regular service via radio between the United States and Europe was first established in 1927 using long-wave frequencies. Within the first year, this system supported 11,000 calls.

Undersea Cable.  It was soon realized that the number of transatlantic telephone calls would rapidly outgrow the available radio spectrum. Accordingly, transoceanic cable technology was developed that made use of amplifiers or repeaters placed at regular intervals along the length of the cable. The first transatlantic cable was laid in 1956 between Canada and Scotland, a distance of 2,226 miles. This system made use of two coaxial cables, one for each direction. 

With the availability of the cable system, transatlantic telephone traffic increased dramatically, from 1.7 million calls in 1955 to 3.7 million in 1960. Six additional coaxial cables, representing four successive generations of cable design, were laid across the Atlantic Ocean between 1956 and 1983.  From 1989 to 2001 a total of 15 new transatlantic optical fiber cables were deployed, along with a similar number of transpacific cables.

Satellite.  In 1962, AT&T in conjunction with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched the communication satellite Telstar.  Telstar 1 served as a repeater in the sky; that is, it simply translated all frequencies within its receiving bandwidth to frequencies in its transmitting band. The bandwidth of Telstar 1 could support one one-way television signal or multiple two-way telephone conversations. 

Because of its low orbit, Telstar was not always in view of the communications ground stations. This problem was solved in July 1963 with the launch of the first geostationary communication satellite, Syncom 2.  Syncom 2 was followed by a series of geostationary satellites, each providing a capacity greater than the previous generation.

 

American-built Telstar 1 communications satellite, launched July 10, 1962, to relay television signals and telephone calls.

After Dial Phones

Touch-Tone Phones.  Researchers at Western Electric, AT&T's manufacturing subsidiary, had experimented with using tones rather than pulses to trigger telephone connections since the early 1940s, but it wasn't until 1963 that dual-tone multifrequency signaling, which uses the same frequency as speech, was commercially viable.  AT&T introduced it as Touch-Tone dialing and it quickly became the next standard in telephone technology, both in the U.S. and worldwide. By 1990, push-button phones were more common than rotary-dial models in American homes.

Modern telephone instruments are largely electronic. Wire coils that performed multiple functions in older sets have been replaced by integrated circuits.  Mechanical bell ringers have given way to electronic ringers. The carbon transmitter dating from Edison’s time has been replaced by microphones, in which sound waves cause a thin, metal-coated plastic diaphragm to vibrate, producing variations in an electric field across a tiny air gap between the diaphragm and an electrode. The telephone dial has given way to the keypad.  Finally, a number of other features have become available on the telephone instrument, including last-number recall and speed-dialing of multiple telephone numbers.

 

AT&T touch-tone telephone, 1968.

9-1-1.  Prior to 1968, there was no dedicated phone number for reaching first responders in the event of an emergency. That changed after a congressional investigation led to calls for the establishment of such a system nationwide. The Federal Communications Commission and AT&T soon announced they would launch their emergency network in Indiana, using the digits 9-1-1 (chosen for its simplicity and for being easy to remember).

But a small independent phone company in rural Alabama decided to beat AT&T at its own game.  On February 16, 1968, the first 9-1-1 call was placed in Haleyville, Alabama, at the office of the Alabama Telephone Company.  The 9-1-1 network would be introduced to other cities and towns slowly; it wasn't until 1987 that at least half of all American homes had access to a 9-1-1 emergency network.

Caller ID.  Several researchers created devices for identifying the number of incoming calls, including scientists in Brazil, Japan, and Greece, starting in the late 1960s.  In the U.S., AT&T first made its trademarked TouchStar caller ID service available in Orlando, Florida, in 1984.  Over the next several years, the regional Bell Systems would introduce caller ID services in the Northeast and Southeast.  Although the service was initially sold as a pricey added service, caller ID today is a standard function found on every cell phone and available on almost any landline.

Cordless Phones.  In the 1970s, the first cordless phones were introduced.   Cordless telephones are devices that take the place of a telephone instrument within a home or office and permit very limited mobility - up to 330 feet. Because they communicate with a base unit that is plugged directly into an existing telephone jack, they essentially serve as a wireless extension to existing home or office wiring. Generally speaking, each successive generation of cordless phones has offered improved quality and range to the consumer.

 

Cordless telephone, 1995.

Mobile Phones

Mobile radio development started in the 1920s in Europe and the U.S. for use in vehicles like taxi cabs, police cruisers, and ambulances. During World War I,I Motorola developed a backpacked Walkie-Talkie and a hand-held battery-powered two-way radio (about the size of a man’s forearm) for the U.S. military.

The first mobile telephone call was made by AT&T in 1946. By 1948 wireless telephone service was available in almost 100 U.S. cities and highway corridors. But, throughout the phone call in these early examples, a mobile phone had to stay within range (up to about 20 miles) of a single high-power transmitter on a tall central tower.  At that time there was no way to continue the call if the phone moved from one coverage area to the next.  Besides this geographical limitation, the number of callers who could use the system at the same time was severely limited by the number of available frequencies (or channels).  The network slowly expanded and become more sophisticated, but it never was widely adopted.  By 1980, it had been replaced by the first cellular networks.

Cell Phones.  In an internal memo for AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in 1947, Douglas Ring (my uncle), outlined a new mobile telephone concept - a system comprised of multiple low-power transmitters spread throughout a city (up to two miles apart) in a hexagonal grid (the term “cell” did not come into common use until almost 20 years later), with automatic call handoff from one hexagon to another, and reuse of frequencies within a city, greatly increasing the number of simultaneous callers. Unfortunately, the technology to accomplish this revolution didn’t yet exist.

Effective implementation of the cellular concept did not come until the 1970s, after Richard Frenkiel and Joel Engel of Bell Labs applied improved computers and electronics to make it work.  Ironically, the first cell phone call was made on April 3, 1973 by Motorola manager Martin Cooper, who called his rival Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T’s Bell Labs, to announce his success.  Thus began the era of the handheld cellular-mobile phone.

It took another decade for cell phones to reach the public, mostly because cell towers and other infrastructure had to be put in place. The first commercially available handheld cellular phone was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which hit the market in 1983; the device was 10 inches tall, not including its three-inch flexible whip antenna, and weighed 2 pounds.  It was priced at $3,995 (over $10,500 in today’s dollars) and offered a half-hour of talk per battery charge, which took roughly 10 hours.  This cell phone offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers.  A series of the DynaTAC phones were manufactured by Motorola from 1983 to 1994, and were affectionally known as “bricks.”

The original cost for mobile phone service was around $50.00 per month and included 0 minutes.  Every call was billed at $0.45 cents per minute. These rates did not include long distance costs or roaming costs if you went outside your metro area.

 

The first cell phone available to the public was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, manufactured from 1983-1994.  It was 10 inches long and weighed 2 pounds.

Because of the high cost for purchase and use, early cell phones were primarily used in the sales and business world, but not often for personal use.  Subsequent models were smaller and more mobile.  They had longer battery lives and more talk time, making them more popular.  

Early cell phones were just for talking. Gradually, features like voicemail were added, but the main purpose was talk.  

In the 1990s mobile phone systems replaced analog with digital transmissions, thereby increasing speed, flexibility, and capacity. Text messaging and access to media content like ring tones and news headlines were now available.  As the technology advanced, cell phone companies figured out how to pack all the features their customers wanted into smaller, portable, more affordable models.

Smartphones.  Cell phones evolved into “smartphones.”  In 1992, IBM developed the first smartphone, combining a computer with a speaker, a microphone, a touchscreen keypad, a display screen, a battery, a transmitter, and an antenna.  The smartphone was released to the public in 1993 by BellSouth.  Besides being a mobile phone, it also contained a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, email, send and receive fax, and games.

The early 2000s saw the development of cellular systems characterized by high-speed internet access.  For the first time, streaming of radio and television to handsets became possible.  Rapidly expanding applications software, better screen resolution, and constantly improved interface make cell phones easier to navigate, and more fun to use.  Add to that an expanding capacity that can hold as much memory as a computer would just a few years ago, and continuing speed improvements.  The purpose of the cell phone has shifted from a verbal communication tool to a multimedia tool, often adopting the name “mobile device” rather than being called a phone at all.

Modern day smartphones - the Apple iPhone in particular - changed everything that consumers expect from their phones. In addition to telephone calls, email, and texting, the “app” market has transformed the phone into a virtual toolbox with a solution for almost every need. 

Here is a selection of applications that Pat and I use; there are many, many more.  We can use our contact list to direct dial contacts.  We can do our banking on cell phones.  We can pay our bills at stores, e.g., the grocery store.  We can surf the web.  We can watch movies, sporting events, and watch and listen to podcasts or music.  We can measure the size of a room.  We can buy and sell things on the internet.  We can conduct research.  We can participate in a variety of social media.  We can navigate, using online maps and written or voiced directions.  We can check the news and weather.  We can plan trips and make travel arrangements.  We can read books, magazines, and newspapers.  We can summon ride-share companies and AAA.  We can use office apps to write, make spreadsheets, and produce presentations. We can share files with multiple nonresident people.  We can scan documents.  Wherever we are, we can control household devices, like alarm systems, air conditioning, and lights, and even start our automobiles.  We can control our hearing aids.  Not only can we take photos, we can process them, make photo albums, and store thousands of photos on the cloud.  We can play a multitude of games.  We can direct many of these applications with voice commands.  And face and fingerprint recognition, and passwords, provide handy security for our cell phones.

It’s not just the technology of the cell phone that has changed over time, the physical design has also gone through a rollercoaster of changes. Like computers, the cell phone has become dramatically smaller as customers demanded smaller, sleeker cell phones. Today, cell phones fit in the palm of your hand, weigh only a few ounces, and do everything but slice bread.  And much of the smart phone’s capability today is available on an Apple watch!

 

Today's Apple iPhone 12 mini smartphone exhibits multiple functions and apps.

Ironically, in recent years, some cell phone designs have actually started to become larger and simpler, making room for a larger screen and fewer buttons. Because phones have become mobile media devices, the most desirable aspect is a large, clear, high-definition screen for optimal web viewing.  Even the keyboard is being taken away, replaced by a touch screen keyboard that only comes out when you need it. The most obvious example of this is the Apple iPhone and subsequent competitors like the Droid models.

Smart telephone usage has expanded from the “head of the family” to everyone in the family, down to youngsters, each with his/her own phone. 

No longer needing high radio towers, cell phone transmitter antennas - many no larger than stereo speakers - can be mounted in church steeples, on trees and flagpoles, and on top of tall buildings.  To avoid the sight of ugly antennas in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills, cell phone providers even started putting some antennas inside fake saguaros.

Providers of telephone services have broadened considerably.  Today, customers can obtain telephone services from landlines, via a direct line from a phone company or from cable TV; via the internet, including video calling and multi-connection conferencing (e.g., Zoom); or from local cell networks.  Customers can now choose among payment plans that charge by call-time minutes and/or data rates, and can select packages that combine TV, internet, and telephone services.

Cell Phone Impact on our Lives

The cell phones of today are also replacing our gadgets and changing how we do things.  When cameras were first introduced on phones, the images were low quality and the feature was considered to be just be an extra.  With rapid improvements, we're seeing a very fast shift to where consumers don't even bother carrying their point-and-shoot cameras anymore, and just use their cell phones.  Cell phones have largely replaced dictionaries, paper note pads, watches, timers, (pre)disassembly drawings, and flashlights. Video conferencing via cell phones (and of course iPads and computers) has reduced the requirement for many face-to-face meetings with doctors, lawyers, and financial planners.

Cellular phones have had a major impact on our lives and the way that we perform everyday tasks.  Here are some edited observations from “How Cell Phones Have Changed our Lives,” streetdirectory.com, plus some thoughts of my own.

Cell phones have brought a whole new meaning to the term multitasking. Twenty years ago, it was not possible to talk to the office while you were at the grocery store picking up some necessary items. You could never have had a three-way business conference while you were fixing dinner or been able to deal with a business client from home while caring for a sick child. Cell phones have enabled us to do various tasks all at the same time.

Cell phones have also enabled families to keep in closer touch with each other.  Children can contact you if they have missed their ride from soccer practice and your spouse can call while he is stuck in traffic to let you know that he is going to be late for supper. Teenagers are able to call to ask permission to go somewhere, and with GPS features that are now available on some cell phones, you are able to check to make sure that they are where they are supposed to be.

Cell phones have certainly made our lives much more convenient.  Have you ever arrived at the grocery store and realized that you have forgotten your grocery list? The first thing you would probably do is to call home and have one of your children read the list off to you.  In the same situation in past years, you may have forgotten things or have had to drive all the way back home to get it. If your car breaks down, you automatically call for help instead of having to walk to find a pay phone.

Think how cell phones have changed the lives of people with disabilities, e.g., how blind people can employ voice-activated functions.

Cell phones have also changed the way that people interact with each other.  When we call someone, we are actually calling the person and not a place. This enables us to be more spontaneous when making plans as you rarely get a busy signal and unlike a land line telephone, someone is always home.  Cell phones also enable us to call if we are going to be late for an appointment.

Increased cell phone usage also has a downside.  Some people are constantly “on” the cell phone, even while driving or walking, leading to accidents.  Have you noticed the couple eating at a restaurant (or maybe family members at your own dinner table) who are absorbed in cell phone activities at the expense of personal interaction?

Telephony Today

See this interesting data, edited from “Rise and Fall of the Landline,” theconversation.com.

No. of Connected Telephones.  In 1914, at the start of World War I, there were 10 people for every working telephone in the U.S.  By the end of World War II, in 1945, there were five people for every working phone.  The technology passed a key milestone in 1998, when there was one phone for every man, woman and child in the U.S.  As of 2017, there were 455 million telephone numbers for the United States’ 325 million residents, or 1.4 per person.  About three-quarters of those numbers were tied to mobile phones, a little over 10 percent were for old-fashioned landlines, and the rest were for internet-enabled phones.

Until the early 1980s, many consumers had to rent their phones from AT&T.  Until then, the company had a monopoly over most of the U.S. phone system. And in many states, AT&T would only rent phones to customers. In the early 1980s, the rental fee was $1.50 to about $5 per month, depending on the type of phone.  That changed in 1983, when the U.S. government ended AT&T’s monopoly.  Consumers in all parts of the country suddenly had the option to buy their own phone. At the time, the price for the most basic black rotary dial phone was $19.95, a bit over $50 in today’s dollars. The fanciest Trimline phone with push-buttons, instead of a rotary dial, was sold for about $55, which is over $150 today.

Long Distance Cost.  One reason that phones have become so indispensable for communicating is that the cost keeps dropping to make calls.  Making a coast-to-coast phone call a century ago was very expensive. Back in 1915, a three-minute daytime phone call from New York City to San Francisco cost $20.70.  Adjusted for inflation, that means the rather abrupt call cost more than $500 in today’s money.  Over the next half-century, prices fell drastically, although it was still rather pricey.  In 1968, the same three-minute call cost $1.70 - or over $12 today.

Today, almost no one thinks about the price of a single cross-country call or tries to keep conversations short to save money.  Phone call prices plummeted after the breakup of the U.S. telephone monopoly in the 1980s.  And the invention of technologies like “voice over IP” - popularized by Skype - pushed prices down even further.

After decades of recording phone call costs, the FCC reported the average long-distance call in 2006 cost just 6 cents per minute. Since most people don’t pay by the minute anymore an extra minute of talking on the phone today is effectively free.

There’s a dark side to cheap calls, however.  Robocalls are now constantly spamming Americans. The same reduction in price makes it easy for con artists to ring millions of phone numbers looking for someone gullible enough to believe their pitches.  (Caller ID and call blocking of specified and unknown callers can alleviate much of this problem.)

Phone Demographics.  In 2018, a government survey found that almost 55 percent of households use cellphones exclusively, up from less than 10 percent in 2005. Another 36 percent have both a mobile phone and a working landline.  Just over 5 percent of those surveyed said they relied entirely on a landline, compared with over a third of households in 2005.  The remaining 3 percent said they didn’t have a phone.

Future Telephones

The smart cell phone has changed and developed so rapidly in the past decades that it seems as though almost anything you can imagine is possible for the future. The convergence of all our tech gadgets into one mobile device will continue to advance.  Experts believe that the majority of the hardware and the software can be moved to “the cloud” and the product will mainly be comprised of the input and the display.

It’s not just about how we will change cell phones; the question is, how much more will cell phones change us?