Cadet Hamilton Shaheen Major Youna Jung
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Cadet Hamilton Shaheen Major Youna Jung CIS 270WX-01 April 2, 2015 Telephones in the United States In modern times communication is quick and easy with towers all over the world transmitting calls and messages to basically any destination at the press of a button. Modern technology allows letters to be sent through the Internet in the form of email, quick text messages to be sent between cellphones, and phone calls to be placed to anywhere in the world. Society has developed to the point where everyone is always connected, but it has not always been that way. It all started with a fantastic invention thought up by Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone. It has not always been quick and painless to get a message out. In the earliest days of American history those who wanted to send a message had to write it out with pen and paper in the form of a letter. If they made a mistake they had to start all over. They then had to take this letter to a post office and wait for weeks even months for the letter to be received and responded to. This could take especially long if these letters were going from to another country or even another continent. In the case of the United States it was even difficult to get a message from one coast to the other. Then came the telegraph, which allowed messages to be transmitted over wires, decoded on to paper and then delivered to its recipient. This method was quicker than writing a letter but still not all that efficient, due to the fact that the message had to be put into Morse code and then deciphered by whomever received the message. Finally the telephone was invented. The telephone allowed people to call and have a conversation with another person as if they were face to face. The telephone revolutionized the communication industry in the United States while creating a global society and is still playing a major role in modern life. The invention of the telephone is credited to Alexander Graham Bell who came up with the idea while trying to improve the telegraph machine in the late 1870s. Due to the fact that the telegraph machine used Morse code to transmit messages it only allowed for one message to be sent and received at a time (4). This was hardly and effective way to have a conversation. Originally Bell was trying to create a machine that could send out Morse code messages on different frequencies to allow multiple messages to be sent and received at once. While working on this project Bell came up with the concept of a machine that could transmit speech. He and a partner built the first telephone in the late 1870s. The first words transmitted by the machine were “Mr. Watson—Come Here—I want to see you,” spoken by Bell to his assistant Watson who was in the other room (4). The invention was a success and was an instant hit. The first telephone line was built from Boston to Somerville Massachusetts and was completed in 1877 and by the end of 1880 there were 47,900 telephones in the United States (4). The growth rate was incredible and people were able to communicate more readily than ever before. Connections between different cities and states kept springing up every year. In 1915 transcontinental service by overhead wire was implemented which was huge (4). This technology was able to make the world smaller. Instead of sending letters over the ocean and waiting long periods of time for a response which wasn’t event guaranteed, one could now simply pick up a telephone and call someone in another country. This made travel much easier and definitely contributed to a more global society. The telephone has been tweaked and rebuilt over the years to be user-friendlier. The original design of the telephone is known as the candlestick model. This model is probably what comes to mind when thinking of Bell’s original phone. It had a tube with an end that was spoken into, the mouthpiece, and a detachable cup that was held to the ear, the receiver (5). This design was popular all the way up to the 1930s when it was knocked into the back seat by the rotary phone. In this model you would rotate the dial wheel to the number you wanted to select then release it and repeat until the whole phone number was entered. This method was incredibly tedious and gave way to push button phones in the 1970s (5). In 1963 AT&T invented the more modern push button dial pad. The next huge development in the history of telephones was the answering machine. This allowed users to call people and leave them messages even if the phone was not answered (5). During the 1980s the next big thing in terms of telephones was invented, cordless telephones. No longer was the user required to stay near the phone’s base station. Then in 1984 the first mobile telephone was invented costing almost $4 thousand dollars per unit. Eventually caller ID was invented and flip phones came around as well. Next came palm pilots and smart phones and eventually the iPhone and android (5). Currently a phone is more like a computer, what a long way telephones have come since Bell’s original invention almost 140 years ago. The telephone industry created an economic boom in the United States. Companies had to produce these telephones and that created an industry in itself. People also had to be hired to place the wiring for the new telephone lines and to do maintenance on the lines when something went wrong. In 1877 the first switchboard for telephones was set up in Boston creating jobs for many Americans. The most significant economic boom created by the telephone was the creation of the Bell Telephone Company in 1878 (4). This was the first telephone company and is still around today but is probably more recognizable by the name AT&T, which employed around 243,620 people in 2014 (2). The company also made billions of dollars in profit in 2014 playing a significant role in the United States GDP (3). In modern time AT&T isn’t the only phone company around, it competes with many other companies such as Verizon, Cingular, and nTelos. The telephone industry today employs around 861,500 employees this includes engineers, operators, customer service, and many other careers (1). It is safe to say that the United States depends on its telephone industry not only for quick communication, but also as a significant source of jobs for the American people. Today phones are an integral part of everyday life. Humans have basically the knowledge of every encyclopedia at their fingertips in the form of cell phones. In a society that demands that every thing be done immediately cell phones have answered that call. Every major firm now has mobile websites or mobile applications. Human influence on the telephone has lead to the need of almost no of face-to-face contact. Everything can be done on a cell phone. It will be interesting to see where this technology goes in ten, twenty, even fifty years: the sky in the limit. In conclusion, the United States has come a very long way in terms of telephone technology that was kicked off almost 140 years ago by Alexander Graham Bell. People in present day can thank Bell for shrinking the world down to one quick phone call and allowing connecting with family and friends to be quick and simple. While humans have influenced what the phone has become, the phone has influenced the direction in which society had gone. With out the Telephone the United States would be out a major industry and probably would not have been able to make many of the other developments taken for granted today. Works Cited [1]“About the Telecommunications Subsector." U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2015. [2]"AT&T: Number of Employees 2007-2014 | Statistic." Statista The Statistics Portal. Statista The Statistics Portal, n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2015. [3]"AT&T Reports First-Quarter Earnings 2014 | AT&T." AT&T Reports First-Quarter Earnings 2014 | AT&T. AT&T, n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2015. [4]Bellis, Mary. "History of Public Telephone Service - Inventions." About.com Inventors. About.com, n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2015. [5]Zigterman, Ben. "How We Stopped Communicating like Animals: 15 Ways Phones Have Evolved." BGR.com. BGR, 13 Dec. 2013. Web. 02 Apr. 2015. Directory: shaheenhs17 -> files -> 2015 2015 -> Cadet Hamilton Shaheen Major Youna Jung 2015 -> Cadet Hamilton Shaheen Major Youna Jung Download 18.46 Kb. Share with your friends:
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