Telecommunications History Group

On June 17, 1914, the first transcontinental telephone line was completed on the border of Nevada and Utah. The last of more than 130,000 poles was erected at Wendover and construction teams from the Bell Telephone Company of Nevada and the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company met, making the last splices in the wires which joined East and West in voice communications for the first time.

For five years, AT&T had placed audions (the first vacuum tubes) along some 3,400 miles of wires that connected the U.S. coasts. Because voice signals gradually weakened as they traveled, a boost of the signal was needed to complete a "long distance" transmission. The audions boosted the signal as it passed along the wire.

The first trial took place in July, 1914, when Theodore Vail (then President of AT&T) spoke for the first time from one coast to the other. His voice was boosted in several spots along the way. The previous record for a long distance call was from New York to Denver; this call required those on each end to shout.

Congratulations to the winners of this year’s National History Day in Colorado best project with a telecommunications theme: Jerry Stone for his web site about inventor Al Grose and John Flower for his paper about how the Internet is influencing the evolution of the English language. We’re so proud to be a part of this wonderful program, and excited to meet these young historians!

Come meet the brilliant young historians, and learn new things at the same time! This is a great way to support the youth of our community.

We still need more judges to evaluate Colorado's incredible students of history. Please share our QR code and sign up to judge.

Save the date: April 27th!

March 10, 1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call in his Boston laboratory, summoning his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, from the next room.

Granville T Woods
1856-1910

Woods’s big breakthrough, in the 1880s, was a communication system for railway workers that he referred to as the induction telegraph. Conductors had a very poor way of communicating with rail stations, so if two trains were heading to the same place at the same time, a collision was all but certain. Woods’s invention suspended a coil beneath the train so that as it moved along the rails, a magnetic field would be created around it, allowing messages to be sent uninterrupted.
But before he could file for a patent, he contracted smallpox and was bedridden for months. In that time, another inventor named Lucius Phelps beat him to the punch. Woods was shocked when he saw an article in Scientific American crediting Phelps for a version of the communications system he had been working on for years. He quickly finished his design and applied for a patent, setting off an investigation to determine who started developing the technology first.
Woods was able to show notes, sketches and a working model of the invention, and he secured the patent in 1887.

from The New York Times article “Overlooked” by
Amisha Padnani www.nytimes.com

I found this Mountain Bell King Kong poster in our Telecommunications History Group Archives. You can view our website at https://www.telcomhistory.org

Here is a network drawing that I found in our Telecommunications History Group Archives in downtown Denver.

Telephone Years
by Deborah Garrison

There are gestures that have been lost.
One was picking up a desk phone
Using a couple of fingers
To snag it under the little shelf where the receiver
Rested when it was not in use;
You’d carry the phone with you if you needed to pace,
Perhaps with a studied restlessness that felt good:
You were removing a solid object from its position
And that had meaning. You gestured with it in hand,
Or held it against your hip. Something both possessive and devil-may-care in it.

The disruption of a ring, the caller unknown,
Was one of the day’s small dramas. We lived for them.
There were hours unaccounted for, pages turned.
Ticking of the heart between rings . . .

A feminine variant was to wear the curling receiver cord
Sashed across your waist, over the elbow, up the arm
So the curls were stretched long, the receiver
Tight-tucked in the neck hollow and pinned to its job—
To speak and to hear, companion of both mouth and ear.
Maybe standing while talking, at a window.
A light pleasure in the binding, an intimacy
With the subject or the person listening
That he couldn’t see.

And the pauses when neither of you spoke
Were alive, space-filling, somehow physical.

You could hear rooms.
Conversations were rooted in them.
They didn’t move around.
You knew there was life in another house—doors slammed,
Supper bells, doorbells, messages scratched on pads, handwriting that told,
People who left rooms and never came back.
People who might surprise you, come from so far there was no phoning them.

I don’t mean that life was better then,
But our conversations were theatre.
Farewell, until
You didn’t know when.

Published in the print edition of the New Yorker Magazine, August 26, 2019, issue.

Deborah Garrison is the author of the poetry collections “A Working Girl Can’t Win” and “The Second Child.”

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, "TEACHER OF THE DEAF", DIES
Many people reading our page are doing so through Mobile telephone devices. So where would we be were it not for Alexander Graham Bell, who died on this day 2 August 1922, age 75.

He was born, Alexander Bell, on 3 March 1847 in Edinburgh. He prevailed upon his father to be given a middle name, just like his two brothers. On his eleventh birthday, his father relented and gave him the name of their Canadian lodger and friend, Graham.

Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife, Margaret, were deaf, influencing Bell's life's work.

His research on hearing and speech led him to experiment with hearing devices which resulted in him being awarded the first US patent for the telephone in 1876.

However, Bell considered a telephone an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have one in his study.

Dr. Bell is buried on top of Beinn Bhreagh mountain, Nova Scotia, on his estate where he had resided for the last 35 years of his life, overlooking Bras d'Or Lake.

Here he is seated – in this wonderful picture – on the right of the top step of the Boston School for Deaf Mutes, in Massachusetts, in 1871.

Throughout his life he referred to himself as 'a teacher of the deaf'.
-------
Sign Up to Stay in Touch at aforceforgood.uk/sign-up

The phones that detect earthquakes Fifty years since the first mobile phone call, the technology we carry around in our pocket is helping to create the world's biggest earthquake detection system.

We were so excited to award this year’s prize to Jerry for his very fine web site about a little-known telecom hero!

Jerry Stone from Denver School of The Arts won best project on Telecommunications with “The Wireless Frontier: Edwin Howard Armstrong and Frequency Modulation.”

Today, people fear Twitter. In the 1850s, they feared telegrams Telegrams were the “Twitter of the 1850s and 1860s” — and they elicited the exact same overblown fears as Twitter does today.

Garfield phone mystery solved after 35 Years Fragments of Garfield-shaped novelty telephones have been washing up along the coast of the Finistère region of Brittany, in northwestern France, for the

Wow!

The Smithsonian Will Restore Hundreds of the World's Oldest Sound Recordings They were made by Alexander Graham Bell and his fellow researchers between 1881 and 1892

The small, mighty, world-changing transistor turns 75 Transistors are everywhere, powering our computers, everyday gadgets like smartphones, and even spacecraft.

A step back or forward?

Pay Phones Are Coming Back in Philadelphia Thanks to Linux, No Quarters Required An "amateur phone collective" is making creative use of Linux and special hardware to help people without cellphones stay connected.

Saint Pancras International train station in London

Still have telephone booths in London. Unfortunately, not the pretty ones!

Philips LT01 telefon és fax.
Made in P.R.C.

For more information about phreaking, read “Exploding the Phone” by Phil Lapsley

Playful Pranks From Apple's Founder Steve Wozniak isn't just known for being a tech innovator. He's also widely-known for playing pranks at the launch of new Apple products — like ordering 4,000 cups of coffee from Starbucks during the launch of the iPhone.

2000 years-before the IPhone..

Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism, the First Computer Hidden inscriptions offer new clues to the origins of a mysterious astronomical mechanism

Finn Spangenberg was honored with the Best Project in a Telecommunications Topic! She featured Sesame Street. The award is given by Telecommunications History Group.

Great collection!

The first sound recording was made before the samurai were abolished.
Samurai seem pretty old-school, a remnant of a feudal past, whereas sound recording feels like a hallmark invention of the modern era. So it’s strange to think that these things actually overlapped — and that sound recording started before the samurai disappeared. When U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s “black ships” arrived in Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) in 1853, the end of the samurai — Japan’s hereditary warrior caste — was close at hand. Perry’s maneuvers opened Japan to the West after centuries of isolation. It would take several more years, but the Meiji Restoration (1868–1889) saw the end of the samurai when feudalism was officially abolished in 1871.

Thomas Edison’s recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1877 is sometimes regarded as the world’s first true sound recording — but that isn’t technically true. In the late 1850s, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville started capturing a series of sounds, including the French folk song “Au clair de la lune” in 1860, using a phonautograph (a machine that captured the image of a sound wave using soot). Scott never designed the phonautograph to play sound back, unlike Edison’s phonograph. But in 2008, scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California successfully recreated some of Scott’s recordings, including the folk song, making the Frenchman’s experiments the first recorded sound in history — and preserved from a time when samurai still roamed the streets of Edo.

(From interesting facts.com)

Sometimes the old technologies are the best

Where Russians Turn for Uncensored News on Ukraine Telegram is the platform of choice for Russians seeking to escape Moscow’s propaganda web. But can it last?

Phone booths still come in handy 😁

Border crossing woes may trip tourists, resorts in MN’s Northwest Angle A new crackdown on border crossings is making it tough to be a tourist to Minnesota's Northwest Angle, the spit of land separated from the rest of the country by Lake of the Woods.

Kids curated the Clyfford Still Museum's latest exhibit and proved they understand abstract art better than adults "I saw one of the abstract art, and it had blue lines and yellow background. And I’m like, it looks like a yellow storm.” Yes, Lydia. Yes it does.