NATIONAL TELEPHONE DAY
1876, Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for the telephone. It is now possible to talk over telegraph lines (Disputed telephone inventor Elisha Gray files a patent in the exact same patent office for the telephone on the exact same day as Alexander Graham Bell, but Bell's patent application gets approved first).
1889, The first payphone is installed on the corner of Main Street and Central Row in downtown Hartford, Connecticut.
1891, Almon B. Strowger in Kansas City receives a patent for his automatic Step by Step telephone switch which takes the operator out of the local call completion who was sending business to his competitor.
1892, The first automatic Strowger Step by Step telephone exchange installed in La Porte, Indiana. Customers can dial their way through the local telephone exchange to the called telephone without operator assistance.
1915, Alexander Graham Bell, located in New York, calls Thomas Watson long distance in San Francisco. What did they discuss? Possibly to argue about who was paying cheaper hotel room rent? (the actual conversation was never made public).
1947, AT&T publishes a new nationwide numbering plan in coordination with the independent telephone operators. The plan divided most of North America into eighty-six Numbering Plan Areas (NPAs). Each NPA was assigned a unique three-digit code. Alberta and the NWT are assigned area code 403.
1948, the “Deskfax" fax machine, was announced. It was a compact machine that fit comfortably on a desktop, using special spark printer paper.
1951, The first customer direct dialed long distance call using an area code was made from Englewood, New Jersey, to Alameda, California.
1962, Touch-Tone telephones were on display for the public to try out at the Seattle World's Fair. There were ten buttons on the telephones. The * and # were missing from the dial pad.
1963, The first commercially available modem came on the market with lightning fast transfer speeds of 300 bits/second.
1968, Engineers envisioned telephones being used to access computers. This led to the asterisk or star (*) and pound or hash (#) keys being added to the dial pad.
1971 Raymond Tomlinson sends the first “@” email message via the ARPANET intercomputer system, utilizing the telephone network.
3 April 1973, Martin Cooper an engineer at Motorola places the first hand-held cell phone call to Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Labs. While making the call he waves at Joel from the street corner outside Joel’s office.
16 February 1978, The first public dial up BBS - Electronic Bulletin Board Service officially went online in Chicago. The first public dial-up BBS was developed by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE). The rise of the Internet in the early 1990s eventually makes BBS service obsolete.
1988, ISDN – Integrated Services Digital Network is introduced. The start to sending digital data over the “Last Mile” begins. Sales said the acronym meant “I See Dollars Now,” but technicians said it meant “It Still Does Nothing.” Uptake on ISDN is slow. (The "Last Mile" is that connection from the telephone exchange to the home or business using the service)
1989, In March this event’s organizer officially becomes a Telephone Pioneer
1991, The World Wide Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and was opened to the public in 1991.
Dec. 3, 1992, Engineer Neil Papworth typed "Merry Christmas" on a computer and sent the first SMS message to the cellphone of Richard Jarvis. Jarvis read it on his Orbitel 901 cell phone, a phone that weighed more than 4 and a half pounds
1993, the first easy to use and install web browser, called Mosaic (later renamed Netscape), becomes available and is often credited with sparking the Internet boom.
Mid 1990’s, ADSL – Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line technology overtakes ISDN and competes with coax cable TV service for Internet service on the Last Mile.
2007, the first “smart phone” is introduced that can accommodate “apps” and more than 100 million apps were downloaded in the first 60 days from it’s app store opening. Smart phones changed everything. Around the world, there are an estimated 9.82 billion mobile phones. And while some predicted the landline to be obsolete by 2021, there are still about 931 million landlines in use around the world. The “phone” part of your mobile phone now seems like an afterthought. An entire generation has grown up without phones that plug into walls. Even early cell phones now seem obsolete.
April 25, 2024, we observe National Telephone Day. Why today? I don’t know.
HOW TO OBSERVE NATIONAL TELEPHONE DAY
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Celebrate the day by calling someone and telling them Happy National Telephone Day! Go ahead. Shock your friends with an actual phone call on National Telephone Day. They'll likely think you have something very urgent to tell them.
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Get nostalgic. Ask your grandparents about the effort needed to "dial" on a telephone and why they dreaded numbers with lots of nines and zeroes.
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Try placing a call with a rotary dial phone.
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Actually make eye contact and talk to someone while your smart phone is put away in your purse or pocket.