Mobile phones and wireless technology are all around us nowadays, and it’s hard to imagine a life without it. Still, the mobile phone is a relatively new invention, and it’s quite impressive seeing these young  ladies experiment with a wireless phone back in 1922:

How incredible it may seem, the actual history of telephony goes back way further, all the way to the 19th century.

Every great invention is preceded by people that laid the foundation for others to build upon. In 1838 Samuel Morse made the first steps in telecommunication by inventing Morse code, which allowed people to send and receive complex messages over long distances trough electrical signals and copper wire. After Congress granted Morse permission to install the first telegraph cable, in 1844, the copper wires rapidly spread out across the globe.

From telegraph to telephone

Now that it was possible to send coded messages through a copper wire, shouldn’t it be just as easy to the same with an audio fragment? This was on the mind of many inventors after the telegraph became popular, and by 1870 several inventors were working on creating the first telephone. On a given day in March 1876 Alisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both applied for patent on their creation. Unfortunately for Gray Bell was a few hours earlier, which lead to Bell’s fame as inventor of the telephone – and he made good money with it.

On March 10 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first words ever to be wired through a telephone cable: “Mr. Watson -come here- I want to see you.” These words were meant for his assistant, who was in the adjacent room. Even though the reach of a phone call was very limited at first, by 1890 most parts of Europe and the USA were covered and hooked up to the network. In the USA alone there were 250.000 phones at the time.

In 1896 the ‘candlestick’ models were replaced by telephones that used a rotary dial, and these models actually started to look like telephones as we’ve used them most of our lives (unless you’re still a kid, but in that case; have patience, we’ll get to the familiar stuff). This would remain unchanged for the decades to come.

Are you curious about the next steps in the evolution telephony? Be sure to check out our next articles in the series!

In 1915, almost 40 years after Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson had their first historic telephone conversation, they would have another. This time it concerned the first trans-continental conversation by telephone. From New York, Bell repeated the words he uttered in 1876: “Mr. Watson -come here- I want to see you. Only this time, Watson wasn’t in the room next to Bell, but in San Francisco, and he answered: “It will take me five days to get there now.”

In the decades that have passed since Bell claimed his invention the telephone made significant progress. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), owner of the Bell Telephone Company since 1899, worked hard to expand their cable network to all major cities in the country. The rapid growth of telephony could not be missed, and the immense popularity of the telephone in the USA can be illustrated by the increasing number of phones; in 1900 there were 600.000 phones in American households, but just 5 years later this was up to 2,2 million, and more than tripled to 7 million in 1910!

During the first decade of the 20th century telephony took off in Europe, especially in Germany and England. In 1910 there were 3 milion telephones in European households.

The influence of World War 1

The fact that the telephony rapidly evolved to a popular mean of communicating became very clear when World War 1 broke out in Europe. It was the first war since the invention of the telephone. Up until then officers mainly communicated through handwritten notes, the telegraph and other visual signal systems. Of course the telephone meant that communication was much faster en more effective. But progress was still slow; operators and signallers had to be trained, and cables needed to be laid over several kilometers through army lines. Radio, another popular way to communicate during WW1, didn’t need any cables. However, radios were quite heavy and the signal could be intercepted than was the case with telephony.

You often hear that wars accelerate inventions and innovation. Indeed, in 1915 the first field telephones could already be spotted on the battlefield. These were much lighter than radios en could easily be transported over long distances. By 1917 the Germans had laid 319.000 miles of cable on the Western Front, and 216.000 miles on the Eastern Front. At first these were laid above ground, but it quickly became clear that cables needed to be buried to prevent them from damage by warfare.

More progress because of warfare?

In 1917 the USA joined the war, and they brought with them an army of, indeed.. women. To manage the switchboards in France and England they needed operators, and since the men needed to fight at the front the Signal Corps started recruiting women instead. 450 employees of commercial telephone companies like AT&T were selected to work as operator. These women quickly became known as the ‘Hello Girls’. Even though they played a crucial role in the war, they weren’t officially named war veterans in 1978.

WW1’s technological developments helped automate the telephone system after the war had ended. By then it was hard to imagine a life without it and the rapid growth of telephony proved it was here to stay. Proof for this is a study conducted by AT&T in 1919. The idea was to measure the heads of 4.000 people, to determine what the perfect distance between the microfoon and the mouth would be for a standard headset.

From this moment on telecommunication became somewhat less dynamic, but certainly not less interesting.

After the atrocities in the Great War people were certain: this would never happen again. Everybody put their focus on a future of cooperation, innovation and hope. These positive sentiments resonated in the technological developments that characterized that era; airplanes got bigger and were able to cover longer distances, and radio and television brought the world closer to each other.

With the help of radio communication telephone rapidly took over the world. On January 7 1927 the first trans-Atlantic phone call was realized between London and New York, between AT&T President Walter S. Gifford and Sir G. Evelyn P. Murray, secretary of the British post office. During this conversation Gifford declared: “We are opening a telephone channel between New York and London. The people from these two major cities will be brought within speaking distance of each other.” He added: “They’ll become neighbors.”

Transatlantic telephone

Gifford’s speach made it clear exactly what hope and expectations the opening of this new communication channel funded. Not only will it bring people closer together, it will also boost technological and economic advances. “Nobody can predict the outcome of these developments,” he stated.

Gifford’s expectations soon became reality and the world indeed became smaller. On April 3 1930 the trans-Atlantic  phone service reached Argentina, Chile and Uruguay; the rest of South America followed not long after. Just five years later the entire world was connected by telephone. On April 15 1935 a phone call between Gifford and AT&T Vice President Miller was realised. While the two men were only 15 meters apart, the call was routed through the longest circuit ever, which was a whopping 37.000 kilometers! Operators from all over the world were listening in on this conversation. Java and London were asked to give their local times, and Gifford was joking with the British operator – Amsterdam wasn’t connected at that moment.

Even though cables were wires through all land in the world, telecommunication accross oceans was still very dependant on radio technology. Efforts were made to wire cables through the bottom of the ocean, but these repeatedly failed. It wasn’t until 1956 that the first permanent cable ran from Scotland to Nova Scotia – which just so happened to be Alexander Graham Bell’s place of residence.

Phone operators

With the emergence of transatlantic telephone a new profession arose; that of the operator. The first telephone operators, at the end of the 19th century, were teenage boys. They were often rude and hard to manage, which made telephone companies decide to hire women; they were friendlier ánd cheaper. The first female operators in the world were sisters Emma and Stella Nutt, they started working for the Boston Telephone Dispatch in 1878.

Since they were in direct contact with the public, these operators had to radiate a positive image. Therefore they received technical training as well as schooling in appearance and formality. Easy at first, the more people that started using a phone the busier it got for the operators. By 1910 they couldn’t leave the telephone alone for a single minute.

To be able te cope with the growing amount of calls phone companies started implementing choice menus. These allowed people to route themselves without intervention of an operator. Despite this the number of operators kept growing until it reached its peak in the late ’40s, with about 350.000 operators working for AT&T alone. In the ’50s machines started taking over. In the beginning operators were still needed to accept and transfer long distance and collect calls, but their numbers rapidly decreased.

At the end of the ’30s the telephone connected people all over the globe and made the world a smaller place. Not only did it bring people closer together, like Gifford had hoped, but a new war threatened as well. What the effect of this new war on the development of telecommunication would be is something we’ll discuss in our next article in this series.

After World War 2 the development of telecommunications took a flight, and just like with earlier innovations AT&T and Bell Laboratories were leading the movement. Already in the ’40s AT&T started  developing an area code system, which was implemented in 1947 dubbed the ‘North American Numbering Plan’ (NANP). This contained all area codes for the USA and Canada.

Assigning area codes

Densely populated cities were assigned with lower area codes, New York was assigned with 212 for example. It might seem random at first, but if you think about it it did make a lot of sense to assign lower area codes to higher populated areas. After all, most telephones back then still used rotary dial to choose a number, so lower area codes meant a shorter dial out time. This made dialing out less ‘labour-intensive’.

The first ‘mobile’ phone

Mobile phones from those days certainly weren’t anything like the mobile phones as we know them today. They resembled car phones – if you can even remember these. Moreover, the first mobile calls could only be made from a car; the dial out system had to be placed in the trunk since it took up so much space. Back in the ’40s it filled up the entire trunk of a car. 20 years later the size was brought back to that of a briefcase.

The American Bell Telephone was once again leading with the introduction of this technology and was the first to offer a mobile telephone service. On June 17 1946 the first mobile call was made in St. Louis, and shortly after Bell Telephone introduced the first car phone service in Chicago. The rise of car phones and mobile telephony also meant the comeback of operators, since every call had to be routed manually. However, Europe had to wait for these innovations to arrive. The first car phone was introduced in 1958 in Germany and it certainly wasn’t a common thing. The happy few that could afford to buy one had to pay almost 50% of the price of a new car.

Telecommunications didn’t stop changing here; during the ’50s and ’60s new ideas were developed. We’ll have a closer look at some of these in our next article.

In the previous installment of this series we discussed the first ‘mobile’ phones: huge machines that could only be used from the trunk of a car. Now we’ll talk about the first mobile phone that actually was mobile.

In 1983 the American company Motorola got a license to commercially market the first mobile phones. These became known under the name DynaTAC 8000x and had an instant classic design because of their bone-like shape. However, buyers had to wait until 1984 before they were finally able to hold their own DynaTAC 8000x.

To properly hold the phone a firm grip was required, since it weighed almost 2 pounds with a lenght of 25 centimeter – excluding the long black antenna. It was a large, heavy and above all pretty clumsy to hold. Not something you would easily slide in your pocket. Besides all these rather impractical characteristics the DynaTAC8000x was very expensive at $3995,-, which by definition made it unavailable for the masses. It’s hard to imagine nowadays, but a mobile phone was simply a thing for the elite – or at least just a small portion of the population. This small fortune would allow you to talk with someone for half an hour and you could store about 30 numbers in your phone. The display couldn’t handle more than a few red digits. We hear you thinking, “Can it get any worse?” Well yes, it sure can; it took a whopping 10 hours to fully charge the phone!

Still, this mobile phone was truly revolutionary compared to the car phones in our previous article, which had to be carried in a briefcase. This revolution can be attributed to one man: Martin Cooper. This 87-year-old ‘father of the mobile phone’ looks back  on his invention: “We always knew the day would come that we would all walk around with a mobile phone. But I never thought I’d be around to witness that.”

Although he seems proud of what he achieved, Cooper looks back critically on the development process and Motorola. The company kept asking him when his ‘child’s project’ would bring in some money, since investments had already been made. Eventually Cooper succeeded to monetize his hard efforts for both himself and Motorola. The company became the global market leader for mobile phones for many years, until it was surpassed by Nokia in 1998.

In our next part we’ll explore some of the more recent steps in the history of telecommunications.

Our previous two articles in the series discussed innovations in hardware, such as the ‘mobile’car phone and the first actual mobile phone. Parallel to these inventions ran a lot of changes in the telecom industry. This article deals with one of those innovations; the rise of Toll Free service numbers.

The pioneers: Zenith numbers and ‘free telephony’

AT&T introduced toll-free service numbers to the American market in the ’60s, but free phone calls were possible before that. During the ’50s the USA and Canada had something called Zenith numbers. To dial these you first had to call a provider, who would route the call to the corresponding Zenith number, which was listed in a special phone book. The costs were charged to the owner of the number. An advertisement in The Spokesman Review from 1959 (to the right) explains the use of a Zenith number for any given business. In England a similar service was available, the so called Freephone Service. German-speaking countries knew this as R-Gespräche.

The first toll-free service numbers

In 1967 AT&T introduced InWATS (Inward Wide Area Telephone Service) in the USA; a system that allowed people to make phone calls for free without the interference of a service provider. This was the birth of the toll-free service number. At first this toll-free number was quite expensive, which meant that the only companies actually using it were the ones that received a lot of calls, like hotels or airports. The expectations of this system weren’t too high, but it still spread accross the country. 25 years after its introduction of InWATS no less than 40% of the long distance calls in AT&T’s network were made through toll-free service numbers.

As with many other things, Europe followed much later. In 1985 British Telecom introduced Linklink; a toll-free service number system with two prefixes, 0800 and 0345. For calls to the 0345 numbers the local tariff had to be paid first, the 0800 numbers were free of charge. Later these became known as ‘lo-call’ and ‘freephone’ numbers.

In the ’80s free 0800 numbers were implemented in most European countries. In Germany the Deutsche Bundespost introduced a system called 0130 Service. Callers could dial these numbers against the local tariff, and in 1990 these numbers became available for free. On January 1 2001 all 0130 numbers were replaced by 0800 numbers, which became the standard.

Service numbers in the now

Thanks to the ongoing digitalization it’s now possible to split the (dialed) number from the connection, which makes it easier to port or route numbers. A service number always used to stay with the same provider, but nowadays  you can easily port your number to a different one. Besides this the service that can be provided in the current ‘intelligent network’ is a lot more flexible, a number can be routed without any hassle. And that’s where we come into play, since toll-free service and freephone numbers are our expertise.

In the last part of this series we’ll tell you all about the digitalization of telecommunications.

We already told you about the rise and evolution of toll-free servive numbers and the first mobile phone. In this article you’ll learn more about the further evolution of digital telephony and mobile telephones; from large analogue machines to the intelligent smartphone as we all know it.

3 generations: 1G, 2G and 3G

When the first mobile phone appeared in the ’80s there were different mobile networks throughout the world. Frontrunner was  Japan, where the first commercial network in the world was already active in 1979. At first it was just Tokyo that was connected, but within 5 years the rest of the country had joined the capital. The USA followed soon after, and  Europe responded by setting up Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM.

All these different networks had one thing in common: they could only be used for calls through the analogue network, but soon the 1G network made a name for itself. In 1991 the first digital mobile network was implemented in Finland by Radiolinja, what later became part of Elisa Oyj. This network was labelled 2G; the second generation of wireless telephone technology. 2G had a few advantages. Information could be transferred encrypted over the digital network, it was more efficient and 2G made it possible to send data as well – like SMS and MMS. And everything was secured digitally.

Though the mobile network evolved rapidly with the introduction of 3G in 2001 and 4G in 2014, the 2g network is still being used today in some parts of the world, but more and more countries choose to gradually shut down their 2G networks.

Digital telephony and smartphones

Already in the ’70s Theodor G. Paraskevakos developed the concept of a phone that could connect intelligence and data processing with a virtual display. This concept could be realized once 2G made it possible to send data over the network.

There are several answers to the question who introduced the first smartphone to the market. In the middle of the ’90s there were 2 devices which could be used to call, email and fax, and a digital calendar was built in as well. These were the early versions of the smartphone:

• In 1994 BellSouth introduced the Simon Personal Communicator.
• In 1996 introduced Nokia their Nokia Communicator.

The Nokia Communicator (photo on the right) had all the functionalities of a personal computer, like email, web browsing, word processing, and combined these with fax and telephony. The device costed over 800 dollar and was everything but handy and easy to use, which scared away consumers and kept them from buying one. The owner of Nokia at that time, Jorma Ollia, stated: “We had exactly the right view of what it was all about… We were about 5 years ahead.”

The first smartphones were primarily suitable for business use, because of the high prices and unpractical design. Its main use was that of personal digital assistent.

The name ‘smartphone’ was coined by Ericsson in 2000, in a campaign to increase its popularity amongst consumers as well. With the introduction of the 3G network (in 2001) and the arrival of lighter, more simple devices at the same time the smartphone finally became a hit. In 2007, the year that Apple launched the first iPhone, already 8 million people worldwide had used a smartphone to visit the internet, and in 2012 there were over 1 billion smartphone users worldwide. It’s estimated that by 2017 the number of smartphone users will approach 2,5 billion. This makes us wonder what technological developments the near future has in store for us – something we’ll discuss in the final part of this series.

This is the last part in our series. We’ve guided you trough almost 200 years of telecommunications, from the invention of Morse code to digital telephony and smartphones. Now it’s time to take a look at what the future has in store for us, with the ever-accelerating technological developments. Since Apple kicked off the smartphone revolution we’ve embraced apps and gained easy access to tons of services that, prior to this smartphone age, would have required a lot more gadgets and resources. Our relationship with technology has fundamentally changed, and the possibilities are so endless it’s impossible to predict what the future of telecommunications will look like. But we can at least give it a try!

Gemalto, a global company in digital security, held a survey amongst 1,200 young adults (18-30) from all around the world. Respondents were evenly split between Brazil, China, France, Germany, the UK and the US. They were asked about their expectations, which resulted in some fascinating insights from the dominant consumers of the near future. We’ll provide you with the key findings of the full report – a whopping 18 pages summarized for your reading pleasure!

Trends for the future of mobile

Smartphones have lead to a massive rise in mobile data consumption. Technical advances and internet speeds have drastically altered what is possible, and the industry is constantly pushing these boundaries.

Respondents were asked what they think the future of mobile has in store for us. No less than 87% believes access to whatever content will be seamless, and 61% is sure that WiFi offloading will be common. The same goes for the trend of mobile payments, which recently took flight. Half of the respondents thinks it’ll be easy to make any kind of payment through your smartphone. Needless to say there are some cultural differences: only 19% of French respondents expect mobile payment, vs 69% of the Brazilians.

Generally, convenience is key. Issues regarding functionality will have been resolved as the frictionless nature of mobile is a big theme in the report. Another key element is unlocking. Fingerprints are rated as the most popular method in 2025, but facial recognition (44%) and retinal scanning (43%) have also surpassed the PIN/password method (40%). Almost a third thinks our smartphones will be equipped with a DNA scanner by then, with highest expectations amongst the Chinese (47%) and Brazilians (36%), vs an average of 32%.

A hyper-connected society

A lot has been said about the Internet of Things (IoT), but it seems inevitable that it will forever change the way we live our lives. From industrial innovations to an IoT that will simplify our daily routines, the potential is huge. Smart cities are the obvious product of an all-encompassing IoT, and transportation was the key focus of this part of the survey.

Companies like Google and Tesla are already running elaborous tests with autonomous cars and trucks, and 63% thinks that our cars will be driverless by 2025. Of course navigation can’t stay behind: 62% thinks that 3D maps will be displayed in front of you as you drive. As cars will be autonomous and intelligent, so is public transport. Nearly 70% believes that by 2025, we’ll have high-speed connections even when travelling underground. Public transport networks will be able to gauge demand on increase of decrease the frequency of service, which will this hugely benefit the environment. Again, European respondents prove to be much more conservative than their Brazilian, Chinese and American peers.

Smart living

How about connectivity and our health? 63% thinks heart-rate monitors will eventually be able to show you a 3D display of your heart, with daily reports updating you about your status. More than 50% believes we’ll have implants for monitoring purposes. This way you’ll never forget a doctor’s or dentist’s appointment again, since your devices can make an appointment when needed and remind you as well. The Brazilians and Chinese are the most optimistic about the mind-reading potential of computers, with over 40% expecting direct brain interfaces.

Technology in 2025 will help us plan our daily lives better. By now it’s already quite normal to speak to our phones, with personal assistants (PAs) like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or the Google App. But in 10 years’ time our relationship with these PAs will be far more developed, and the increasing connectivity will have profound implications on every aspect of our lives. Despite these predictions it’s impossible to foresee what our lives will be like in 10 years. But one thing is for sure, and that is that Samuel Morse could have never expected all this to come from his invention.