The First Telephone Call


Bell on the telephone in New York
(calling Chicago) in 1892


Interesting Facts


Destroyed Telephones

This is a classic example of what happened to most of the telephones of the early days when they were taken out of service. These "Dean" desk and wall sets were thrown in a well by the Pacific Telephone Company in Jacksonville, Oregon sometime around the turn of the century.  Stories have
been told about how telephones were burned, buried, crushed, thrown off the end of piers and destroyed in many other diabolical ways. This is precisely why they are so hard to find today.

Dr. Bell's Prediction Comes True He Talks to a Man "in a Distant Place"

The inventor of the telephone in 1892 opens long-distance service between New York and Chicago over 800 miles of open wire line. Only 14 years before, in 1878, he had predicted that someday "a man in one part of the country may communicate by word of mouth with another in a distant place." Today all New York-Chicago connections are in underground cable, also forecast by Bell. The man with full beard is John E. Hudson, then President of the Bell Telephone Company. Note the Cabinet Desk Set that Dr. Bell is using. Little did Dr. Bell know that in the future there would actually be international phone service.

Not as Simple as It Looks

Your telephone is made up of 201 parts, every one of which had to be planned, produced and assembled with an unusual degree of accuracy.

Such multiplicity of detail is unavoidable in the work of manufacturing telephones, cable, switchboards, and other telephone apparatus. The number of seperate parts entering into all of these products is 110,000; the number of separate parts in a certain well known automobile is 3,000.

House Call

 

The complete telephone man -- 1911 vintage -- was mobile, mechanized and well equipped. With his tools around his waist, he carried telephones on his back, chest and in his bicycle sack. As today, telephone men 80 years ago were safety-minded, which in that era included wearing your sleeve guards and trouser clips.

An Historic Long Distance Call In Europe

This lithograph of the opening of the London-Paris long-distance line in 1891 was furnished to the London Illustrated news on April 11, 1891. The distance from London to Paris is about 300 miles. The Gower-Bell apparatus was used to make this first historic long distance call in Europe. Nowadays, call center services can transmit calls over thousands of miles, not just hundreds.

The Birth of Fiber Optics
Fiber optics is the contained transmission of light through long fiber rods of either glass or plastics

In 1854, John Tyndall demonstrated to the Royal Society that light could be conducted through a curved stream of water, proving that a light signal could be bent.

In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell invented his 'Photophone', which transmitted a voice signal on a beam of light.

In 1880, William Wheeler invented a system of light pipes lined with a highly reflective coating that illuminated homes by using light from an electric arc lamp placed in the basement and directing the light around the home with the pipes.

In 1888, the medical team of Roth and Reuss of Vienna used bent glass rods to illuminate body cavities.

n 1895, French engineer Henry Saint-Rene designed a system of bent glass rods for guiding light images in an attempt at early television.

In 1898, American David Smith applied for a patent on a bent glass rod device to be used as a surgical lamp.

In the 1920's, Englishman John Logie Baird and American Clarence W. Hansell patented the idea of using arrays of transparent rods to transmit images for television and facsimiles respectively.

In 1930, German medical student, Heinrich Lamm was the first person to assemble a bundle of optical fibers to carry an image.

n 1954, Dutch scientist Abraham Van Heel and British scientist Harold. H. Hopkins separately wrote papers on imaging bundles. Hopkins reported on imaging bundles of unclad fibers while Van Heel reported on simple bundles of clad fibers.

In 1961, Elias Snitzer of American Optical published a theoretical description of single mode fibers, a fiber with a core so small it could carry light with only one wave-guide mode. Snitzer's idea was okay for a medical instrument looking inside the human, but the fiber had a light loss of one decibel per meter. Communications devices needed to operate over much longer distances and required a light loss of no more than 10 or 20 decibels (measurement of light) per kilometer.

n 1964, a critical (and theoretical) specification was identified by Dr. C.K. Kao for long-range communication devices, the 10 or 20 decibels of light loss per kilometer standard. Kao also illustrated the need for a purer form of glass to help reduce light loss.

In 1970, one team of researchers began experimenting with fused silica, a material capable of extreme purity with a high melting point and a low refractive index. Corning Glass researchers Robert Maurer, Donald Keck and Peter Schultz invented fiber optic wire or "Optical Waveguide Fibers" (patent #3,711,262) capable of carrying 65,000 times more information than copper wire, through which information carried by a pattern of light waves could be decoded at a destination even a thousand miles away.

In 1975, the United States Government decided to link the computers in the NORAD headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain using fiber optics to reduce interference.

In 1977, the first optical telephone communication system was installed about 1.5 miles under downtown Chicago, and each optical fiber carried the equivalent of 672 voice channels.

Today more than 80 percent of the world's long-distance traffic is carried over optical fiber cables, 25 million kilometers of the cable Maurer, Keck and Schultz designed has been installed world wide.

Test Your Brain

This is really cool. The second one is amazing so please read all the way though. 
 
ALZHEIMERS' EYE TEST


Count every " F " in the following text:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS... 


(SEE BELOW)




HOW MANY ?









WRONG, THERE ARE 6 -- no joke.
READ IT AGAIN !
Really, go Back and Try to find the 6 F's before you scroll down.


The reasoning behind is further down. 







The brain cannot process "OF". 


Incredible or what? Go back and look again!!



Anyone who counts all 6 "F's" on the first go is a genius. 
Three is normal, four is quite rare.