Posted by: Contributing columnist, Clarion-Ledger, Business, March 1, 2016:
If you walk around Monday saying, “Happy Alexander Graham Bell Day!” you are likely to get strange stares, but that’s just because people don’t know the historical significance of that date. March 7 is the 140th anniversary of the invention and patenting of the first telephone by Bell. It’s hard to imagine what the world would be like today if we hadn’t seen the amazing progression of communication since that day. To try to imagine the impact the telephone has had on our life, I think it’s interesting to consider the progression of communication.
Prior to March 7, 1864, and the first phone call using the new technology on March 10, 1864, communication was typically not very fast, and personal communication was painfully slow. I’ve written before about the exponential growth of various types of technology, but specifically in communication, the major historical breakthroughs up until this time had basically only been spoken language, written language, the printing press and the telegraph.
There were smaller innovations, and 25 years later radio would split communications innovations into both personal and broadcast branches, but the short list of innovations at that time reinforces what a huge breakthrough the telephone was for all communications.
Within a year, the first telephone exchange was set up in Boston and the prolific inventors of the time, including Thomas Edison, were contributing inventions that propelled the technology forward. Within 15 years of the first phone, there were phone networks all over New England and London, and Bell even tested a wireless telephone in 1880 using a flashing light system that is somewhat like today’s fiber optic systems. By 1900, existing telegraph cables and new telephone cables led to phone exchanges from Chicago to Florida and across the Florida Straits to Cuba.
While telephone technologies evolved, the various technology changes greatly impacted how they were used in American households. The first calls had manual switches to end-points, and all lines were “party lines” where anyone on the line could listen to the call and no one could use the phone until the callers relinquished the lines. Party lines were still the norm when area codes were first introduced in 1946, and many rural areas had party lines even into the 1970s.
While the back-end of land-line technologies was obviously shifting, the biggest changes consumers would see were those from rotary to touchtone dialing until mobile phones began to be used for business in the 1980s. Most major consumer improvements were made in the wireless arena, which led to widespread and affordable cellphones for consumers by the turn of the 21st century.
While the telephone went from the first patent to broad worldwide use in roughly 100 years, cellphones did so over 10 years, and smartphones have proliferated even faster. While Qualcomm and Palm introduced personal digital assistants in 1999, and an Ericsson combination PDA, phone and limited Internet browser was marketed as a “smartphone” in 2000, nothing opened the industry on anything close to the same scale as the iPhone introduction in 2007. It’s hard to believe that we are still within 10 years from the 2007 introduction of the iPhone and its open app environment. The Android operating system was introduced the same year and even Blackberry’s operating system soon changed to have the same open app environment. Further improvements in the processors, cameras and sensors have opened the door to even higher-quality apps and functions.
As radical as all of the previous innovations were, the open-app environment created a space where anyone could solve a problem by creating an app for the smartphone. It was quickly obvious that 6 billion people could create a lot more solutions than any team of company engineers, and apps have exploded since then. I like to reference a 1991 Radio Shack advertisement floating around the Internet that contained 15 items for sale. The whole list was $3,054 to buy in 1991, but 13 of the 15 items are now found in a smartphone. That was only available because the platform allowed nearly anyone to create unique solutions to solve a problem in their networked smartphone environment.
I’m sometimes asked where we are going next with smartphone technology. Most experts seem to think that smartphones will continue to evolve as a central hub for other systems — connecting smart homes, health and wellness tracking and a variety of other sensors and providing outputs that passively drive actions in the real world. As a central hub of information and action, phones will continue to provide valuable communications back to the rest of the world — a process that obviously started 140 years ago on March 7, 1876, when Bell patented the first telephone.
I want to thank Verizon for having a representative reach out to me to point out the importance of this date and even unsuccessfully trying to arrange our schedules to have me pick the brain of one of their industry historical experts. I hope everyone takes the opportunity to wish at least one person a Happy Alexander Graham Bell Day on Monday and to explain why it’s a day that changed our lives in radical ways.
Tony Jeff is the president and CEO of Innovate Mississippi. He can be reached at tjeff@innovate.ms.