Dring, dring, who’s calling?
Most hotels still have landline phones in their rooms for clients to use. However, with guests increasingly owning a cell phone, will this remain true?
History of the Telephone
The word telephone comes from the Greek roots tēle, “far,” and phonē, “sound”. It was applied as early as the late 17th century to the string telephone familiar to children and was later used to refer to the megaphone and the speaking tube. In modern usage, it refers solely to electrical devices derived from the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and others.
While Italian innovator Antonio Meucci invented the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854, Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device in 1876.
In 1877-78, the first telephone line was constructed, the first switchboard created, and the first telephone exchange in operation. Three years later, almost 49,000 telephones were in use. In 1880, Bell merged with others to form the American Bell Telephone Company and in 1885 the American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) was formed; it dominated telephone communications for the next century. At one point, Bell employees intentionally denigrated the U.S. telephone system to drive down stock prices of all other phone companies and thus make it easier for Bell to acquire smaller competitors!!! By 1900 there were nearly 600,000 phones in Bell’s telephone system; that number increased to 2.2 million by 1905, and 5.8 million by 1910.
Fast forward, the first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by Martin Cooper of Motorola in New York City in 1973, using a handset weighing 2 kilos (4.4 lbs) ! In 1979, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone launched the world’s first cellular network in Japan. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. By 1995, there were 25 million cellular phone subscribers and that number exploded at the turn of the century, with digital cellular phone services now replacing land-line phones for most clients.
From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion, enough to provide one for every person on earth!