It's just one big machine

The telephone network is one global device: probably the biggest and most complicated machine on the planet. Despite its ubiquity, it is a fairly recent invention.

The telephone initially developed using the technology designed for the telegraph (invented by Wheatstone and Morse in 1837). It started out as a manually-switched network (the first telephone exchange was able to handle a whole 21 lines, and was installed in 1878).

Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, though there remains some dispute about whether the inventor's glory should really go to Elisha Grey, whose similar patent was only filed an hour or so later. There is some suggestion the crucial scribbled addendum 'variable resistance' in the margin of Bell's patent may have come from Grey's work.

In the next year, 1877, Western Union turned down an offer of the patent rights for the telephone for $100,000. A few years later, they had realised their mistake, and offered $25,000,000, but Bell refused to sell.

That same year, Thomas Edison demonstrated the phonograph. He had developed it as part of a telephone call transcription service, so that telephone messages could be delivered by telegraph: an early form of the emerging voice message to messaging services being offered today!

Calls were connected by operators. An American undertaker, Almon Strowger, discovered that the local telephone operators were unfairly connecting callers who asked for an undertaker to his rivals, so he decided to design an automatic telephone switchboard!

The first Strowger electro-mechanical automatic exchange went live in 1897, although in Britain it took another 70 years before all subscribers were connected to automatic exchanges.

Modern telephone exchanges are really more like specialist computers, and there are fewer and fewer of them around: the intelligent parts of the switching is done in fewer, larger units.

What used to house a telephone exchange now only holds a "concentrator" where telephone lines are connected to the network.

As with the internet, for telephones, location is increasingly unimportant.

< previous • site map • ^ up • MobileShop.com, mobile phones online • home • glossary • next >