I’m pretty sure that there is enough bandwidth out there now that every single person on earth could be on the phone at the same time. Though, there’d probably be some seriously over saturated lines in more remote locales.
Incidentally, those calls cost roughly $119 a minute in 2009 dollars.
207 Talk Across Ocean on Xmas
CHRISTMAS traffic on the overseas telephone circuits of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company this year eclipsed all previous records. Throughout the day a total of 207 messages was handled, and the connections established involved Europe, South America, Australia, and the “S. S. Belgeland” off the west coast of Central America.
Practically all of the traffic was of a social or personal nature, involving interchange of holiday greetings. The average length of the conversations was five minutes, at a rate of $30 for the first three minutes.
I’ve always wondered if the MoviePhone guy ever uses his own service and if it freaks him out.
She Tells Herself the Time
LONDON now has a time-telling telephone service, obtained by dialing T-I-M on the automatic exchanges. A natural-sounding voice gives the time— but it is, as a matter of fact, a phonographic reproduction. It has been recorded on a glass disc, in the same manner as sound tracks are put on moving-picture films, and similarly reproduced electrically in any telephone circuit connected in. The phone thus functions as does a theatre loud speaker, when connected in the projector’s amplifier circuit.
I had no idea the word telephony was this old.
TELEPHONY
WORLDS GREATEST HANDBOOK Sent FREE!
Would you like a well-paid position as Telephone expert? Only a few minutes a day with this wonder-book will prepare you to break into this fascinating field in less than a year. New edition, includes “automatic” machine switching, “manual” switchboards, long-distance and cable lines,—every engineering, operating and business phase of the great telephone industry.
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I wonder how many other companies in U.S. history have had to write a “We’re being split up by the U.S. government, but here’s why it’s a good thing” ad? I would guess maybe Standard Oil or U.S. Steel, but I’ve never seen one.
If it’s the best telecommunications system on earth, why on earth change it?
If you’ve ever tried to make a telephone call anyplace else on earth, you know what you’ve got in America. The best telecommunications system in the world.
But now you’ve heard the Bell System is on the verge of major changes. Changes in how we’re organized. Changes in the way you can choose to do business with us. Read the rest of this entry »
If you count all of the transistors and other solid state components, a current model iPhone has something on the order of a quarter trillion parts.
“Handie Talkie”
comes out of its case to show its remarkably compact construction. The 5-tube sending and receiving radio telephone weighs only slightly more than 5 pounds, but contains 585 tiny parts. The batteries which operate it have a life of 12-1/2 hours.
The exact same quote about being assigned a phone number at birth is used in the Mechanix Illustrated article Your Telephone Of Tomorrow (Sep, 1956). If you haven’t read that one, be sure to check it out, it pretty much predicts modern cell phones.
Voices Across the Land
Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying,
A copper wire.
—Carl Sandburg
Under a Telephone Pole Screwdriver and splicing knife hanging from his belt, the telephone man keeps history’s happiest invention humming from coast to coast. He watches over 265 million miles of wire, waging war against storm, disaster and pesky animals that chew up or nest in his equipment. He hoists his lines over mountains with helicopters, shoots them across canyons with bow and arrow, strings them through dark conduits far beneath great cities. To every home and office, he gains ready entrance, exuding courtesy and helpfulness.
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