Phone History

If you are interested in purchasing a VOIP system, you should understand what it is. It is often difficult to understand something unless you are familiar with its history. This is why before making the decision to use the newest trend in telephone communication; you are caught up on the history of the phone. When telephones were popularized primarily, they were seen as a fad that were more for entertainment purposes than for commerce, until newspapers and banks began using them to transmit information with ease by virtue of free phone installations. The publicity from this made them immediately more popular and soon phone exchanges were set up in most major cities. Then, back in the 1880’s metallic circuits were developed that allowed for long distance calls, which grew in popularity slowly because of the low price. Later, in the 1890’s, this was overcome by the development of the party line so that families, especially in rural areas, could split the cost.

Then, in1891, a new telephone innovation was reached when a Kansas City man invented the direct dial system because he was paranoid enough to think that the operators were sending his business calls to competitors. In 1927, the first transatlantic call was made over radio waves. During both World Wars, telephone advancements grew rapidly because of heavy spending by the Defense Department. Innovations resulting from wartime experiments included the first mobile telephone system, which connected moving vehicles to landlines via radio. Surprisingly, this was as early as 1946, a year that also saw the development of coaxial cables for major transmission improvements with less interference.

In the 1960’s, when the world was beginning to communicate more freely, telephones were so much a part of the landscape that Bell Telephone could no longer continue to use the alpha-numeric codes for telephone exchanges and switched to longer, all numeric numbers. At the same time, transatlantic cables were being laid to accommodate the increased demand for intercontinental telephone communication. One of the most important shifts in telephone history was the launch of the first telephone satellite in July of 1962. Satellites in geosynchronous orbit could now be used for long distance calls without the need for laying endless lines of cable and did away with the problem of frequent cable damage and repair.

The first real “audio conferencing” could be said to have been the party lines set up back in the early years of telephone use, although at that time the advantages of a party line for multiple users weren’t grasped except as a way to save money. In fact, the fact that several people in different locations could pick up and talk on the line at the same time was considered a nuisance and was actively discouraged as “eavesdropping.” Later, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) became popular for telephone communications because it avoids the toll charges of standard telephone connections. Dial-up internet connections provided near “toll-quality” voice communications, and with broadband connections the increased data throughput enabled businesses to use VoIP in conjunction with other Internet services like data sharing and video conferencing.

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Phone History