A telephone was once a way to communicate via speaking into one end of the equipment and getting feedback from the other end.
In 2017, a telephone can do everything that once required several different machines in order to complete simple tasks.
On March 7, 1876, the patent for the telephone was issued to Alexander Graham Bell, and three days later, he spoke the first intelligible words through this device.
The first phone call, according to americaslibrary.gov, was a call to Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson.
Bell called from New York to Chicago and said, “Mr. Watson, come here- I want to see you.”
When typed out, this phone call was a mere 41 characters, a little less than half the length of an average modern day tweet and a little less than the average 50.9 characters per text message according to researchgate.net.
Years after this phone call, 141 to be exact, technology is something that most people in the United States can more often than not get their hands on.
According to a study done by the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of people living in America own a smartphone in some capacity.
Bell originally began constructing his idea for the telephone when he opened a school for the deaf in Boston, Massachusetts. While in Boston, he became a professor at Boston University teaching vocal physiology.
In an article by history.com, he “experimented with a means of transmitting several telegraph messages simultaneously over a single wire and also with various devices to help the deaf learn to speak, including a means of graphically recording sound waves.”
In the article, it said that Bell felt since he could graphically record them, he should be able to transmit them telegraphically as well.
This was the very beginning of the use of technology in America and brought forth all that is known in the 21st century.
According to the same study done by the Pew Research Center, seven in 10 Americans use some sort of social media, and even a majority of people over the age of 65 use social media
Texting, the use of the internet, phone calls and computers are just few of the many ways people communicate in the modern world.
Mary Curtin can be contacted at mcurtin@kscequinox.com
