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By SHARON KENNEDY WYNNE
Published February 4, 2005
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It looks like it's the end of the line for Ma Bell. With the announcement Monday (1/31) that AT&T Corp. would fold into former a Baby Bell company, SBC Communications, it was a final humbling for what was once the preeminent telecommunications company in the world.
While there is no word yet on what the new entity would be called, the deal marks a coda to AT&T's illustrious history, which began 128 years ago when Alexander Graham Bell and two others formed the Bell Telephone Co.
Sure to be seen as a huge moment in telecommunications history, we thought Monday's news was a good time to look back on other moments in the history of the phone:
1876: When Alexander Graham Bell called to his assistant, "Mr. Watson! Come here! I want you!" he was not simply making the first phone call. He was beginning a revolution in communications and commerce. It spread a web of instantaneous information across towns, then a continent, then the world, and accelerated economic development.
1941: The first touch-tone system was installed in Baltimore. Operators in a central switching office pushed the buttons, but it was much too expensive for general use. The first commercial touch-tone phones were a big hit in their preview at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.
1946: A driver in St. Louis, Mo., pulled out a handset from under his car's dashboard on June 17, 1946, placed a phone call and made history. It was the first mobile telephone call. By 1948, wireless telephone service was available in almost 100 cities and highway corridors. Customers included utilities, truck fleet operators and reporters. Expensive and far from "mobile," the equipment weighed 80 pounds.
1970: The first Picturephone service debuted in downtown Pittsburgh and AT&T executives confidently predicted that a million Picturephone sets would be in use by 1980. What happened? Picturephone was big, expensive, and uncomfortably intrusive. It was only two decades later, with improvements in speed, resolution, miniaturization, and the incorporation of Picturephone into another piece of desktop equipment, the computer, that the promise of a personal video communication system was realized.
1978: The cellular revolution starts when AT&T conducted field trials in Chicago and Newark, N.J. Illinois Bell opened the first commercial cellular system in October 1983.
1984: AT&T is split into regional Bell operating companies by the U.S. government. The pay phone business is decentralized.
1995: The number of U.S. pay phones peaks at 2.6 million
2000: Hurt by the popularity of cell phones and other wireless devices, the number of U.S. pay phones declines to 2.1 million.
2001 : Citing deteriorating business conditions, Bell South announces it will eliminate all 143,000 of its pay phones by the end of 2002, becoming the first Bell operating company to leave the pay phone business.
Source: AT&T and Arthur R.Brodsky's book Telephone
[Last modified February 3, 2005, 13:45:42]
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