1925-Bell Telephone Laboratories is organized as AT&T`s research and development subsidiary. It turns out patentable ideas at the extraordinary rate of one per day. The most celebrated comes in 1947-the transistor-the key to modern electronics that makes possible the miniaturization of many electrical devices. Seven of the ideas, including the transistor, have won Nobel Prizes.
1928-”The Front Page” opens on Broadway. The entire play takes place in a press room in Chicago that has seven telephones, each linked to a newspaper. All action happens offstage, and the audience learns of it by hearing one end of a telephone conversation. There could have been no play without the telephone.
1929-Herbert Hoover becomes the first U.S. president to have a phone installed on his desk. His predecessors used an enclosed booth outside the executive office.
1938-Ogden Nash writes:
Someone invented the telephone
And interrupted the nation`s slumbers
Ringing wrong, but similar numbers . . .
Visionary though he was, it is doubtful that Bell foresaw aluminum-siding salesmen, college alumni volunteers and poll takers interrupting our privacy. These days, it seems, nearly everybody has your number, and never before has the two-edged nature of the telephone been so evident. The telephone invades our privacy with its ring, but it enhances our privacy by allowing us to conduct our business from the safety of our homes, and while it provides instant, private access to other people at a time of our choice, it also works in reverse.
The growth of selling by telephone has given new impetus to the telephone privacy issue. Americans are increasingly subjected to an unsolicited telephone call from a salesman, a poll taker or a machine. Some states are considering laws that would allow customers to indicate in telephone directories that they do not wish to receive sales calls.
These ”telemarketers” appear to be the cause of a telephone trend-the increasing use of the unlisted number. Betweeen 1984 and 1988, the portion of telephone numbers that are unlisted rose from 21.8 percent to 27.6 percent nationwide. Las Vegas led the way at 60.3 percent, probably because its residents sleep a lot in the daytime, and Los Angeles was second at 56 percent. In Chicago, it`s 35 percent.
As a result of telephone privacy problems, new services to insulate people from callers are popular. Call identification allows phone owners to see the numbers of the people who call them, but ironically it has raised great concerns as a threat to privacy.
1939-Abe Pickens, a Cleveland man upset with the world`s march toward war, places long-distance calls to Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Hirohito and other world leaders at a cost to him of about $10,000.
The placing of telephone calls by ordinary people to famous people had become fairly common by this time, and it seems to have lost little appeal over the last half-century. In March, President Bush was duped into thinking he had received a telephone call from the president of Iran, who wanted to discuss freeing American hostages. Bush returned the call and found out it was a hoax.
1939-At 2:40 a.m. on Sept. 1, the telephone brings President Roosevelt first word of World War II-a call from Paris informing him that Hitler has invaded Poland. The disruptions of war brought about a sharp increase in long- distance calling. In 1942, the first full year after Pearl Harbor, there were 114 million long-distance calls-almost double the number of 1941.
The post-war Baby Boom produced a generation that spent its adolescence umbilically attached to the telephone. During the 1950s, many children began using the telephone, which quickly evolved into an ally and necessity for the American teenager. A debate raged among American parents over whether teenagers should have their ”own” telephones. Psychologists say today that the telephone provides adolescents with an important combination of intimacy and privacy and allows them to test certain kinds of adult behaviors without risking the same kind of embarrassment that might occur in a face-to-face group setting.
1954-The telephone company begins listing numbers in the directory using only the first two letters of the exchange rather than the full name of the exchange. Thus, the old Pennsylvania 6-5000 was listed as PE6-5000. It is the first step toward all-numeral telephone numbers.
As telephone usage increased, telephone numbers that began with the first two letters of a pronounceable exchange name were running out. Also, international dialing was increasing, and problems loomed over differences in alphabets and letter shapes. The only logical solution was to go to all-numeral numbers-but it was a radical step, and AT&T balked.
Instead, Ma Bell tried introducing letters that did not stand for a pronounceable word-such as TL. In the late 1950s, the introduction of all-numeral telephone numbers began, and the first sizable place was Council Bluffs, Iowa, in March 1960.
1955-The Hitchcock Memorial Presbyterian Church in Scarsdale, N.Y., begins broadcasting recorded prayers continuously over the telephone, and within a year, churches all over the nation are offering dial-a-prayer services. New York`s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church average 800 calls an hour.
About 1927, telephone companies began offering customers the exact time of day by dialing a special number (in New Jersey, you dialed N-E-R-V-O-U-S). Giving out weather information was launched in Philadelphia and Cleveland in 1950.
The first telephone counseling services involved suicide prevention and poison control and developed in the 1950s.
1959-The Princess telephone-available in white, beige, pink, blue and turquoise-is introduced.
1962-Marilyn Monroe dies, her hand on the telephone, reaching for her life as it ebbed from her. Not long before, she had told an interviewer, ”Do you know who I`ve always depended on? Not strangers, not friends. The telephone! That`s my best friend.”
1963-Touch-Tone service-using buttons instead of rotary dials-is introduced. Hardly anyone buys a rotary-dial phone anymore, but at Fisher-Price toys, sales of its Chatter Phone continue to be steady. Toddlers still love the toy phone with the spinning dials, and the company has sold 28 million of them since 1961-making it one of the most popular toys in American history.
1965-The problem of obscene telephone calls becomes sufficiently grave that it is mentioned in the AT&T annual report. One factor in the rise of obscene calling was the changeover from party lines to private lines about 1960, which decreased the risk of being caught. One psychological explanation was that obscene calls are a symptom of an emotional disorder closely related to exhibitionism.
1967-The first dialed calls from New York to London and Paris are made without the use of an international operator.
1968-Welfare authorities in New York City rule that the cost of local telephone service should be included in computing welfare benefits-and the telephone is thus recognized officially as an essential of life.
1969-AT&T offers a telephone service that automatically reverses the charges-and creates an explosion in catalog shopping by allowing consumers to place orders, usually day or night, by calling a toll-free 800 number. Nearly 7 billion calls were made on the 800 service last year.
1974-The U.S. Justice Department files the largest antitrust suit in history against AT&T.
1980-AT&T develops the 900-number service in response to requests by television networks for a way to conduct instant polls of viewers. It was first used by NBC after the 1980 presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
Today, 900 numbers are providing ball scores, horoscopes, stock quotes, jokes and lots and lots of pornography. Telephone sex services have become a $2.4 billion-a-year business by charging callers up to $50 for the chance to
”talk dirty” to someone on the other end of the line. On the other hand, last fall the Red Cross used a 900 number to raise disaster-relief funds after the San Francisco earthquake.
1982-The final details of the AT&T divestiture are hammered out over the telephone by a Justice Department official who was skiing in Utah.
”Ma Bell,” who built the system linking all the world`s telephones, passed away on Jan. 1, 1984. In terms of her assets and her impact on the lives of ordinary people, she was bigger than any other company and, indeed, bigger than most nations.
Her assets included 182 million telephones and more than a billion miles of wire. She employed nearly a million people, met an annual payroll of $30 billion and, in her final year, earned $5.75 billion on gross revenues of $69.8 billion. She divested herself of 22 local operating companies with combined assets of $115 billion, and was left with a piddling $34 billion.
Her demise left us with lower rates for long-distance calls, higher rates for local service, cheap phones, competing yellow-page directories and confusing phone bills.
1988-A fire sweeps through an Illinois Bell switching station in the Chicago suburb of Hinsdale, leaving about 35,000 homes and businesses with little or no telephone service for about two weeks-and providing a stark picture of what life is like without the telephone (slower, less convenient, less profitable and more hazardous).
Banks couldn`t make transactions, businesses couldn`t run their computers, merchants couldn`t get approval for credit- card purchases, burgler alarms didn`t work and people couldn`t call the police.
The Hinsdale Hospital brought in walkie-talkies so doctors and nurses could communicate between floors; the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago dispatched an unmarked car to secret locations throughout the area so banks could transfer millions of dollars in and out of their banks; doctors, veterinarians, dentists, real-estate agents, travel agents and other business and professional people sent out letters advising their patients, clients and patrons to come in without appointments; and telephone-answering services simply closed up shop-there weren`t any phones to answer.
1990-The U.S. Postal Service unveils plans to raise the price of a first- class stamp to 30 cents in 1991. The increase will only intensify one of the telephone`s least desirable by-products-a precipitous decline in letter-writing. Future biographers and historians will find themselves deprived of an important source-for only rarely are telephone conversations preserved.
Meanwhile, innovation gallops breathtakingly. The miracle phone-portable, wireless and as handy as a pocket calculator-is not far off. It is an advance on the current cellular phone-and will look something like the communicators on ”Star Trek.”
Beam me up, Scotty.
