Your Daily Facts About the Telephone
Heinz Ketchup was invented the same year Alexander Graham Bell made his first phone call.
Alexander Graham Bell thought the phone should be answered with “Hoy, Hoy” instead of “Hello”.
By 1910, New York Telephone had 6,000 women telephone operators.
Mark Twain was one of the first to have a phone in his home.
There was no technology for timing calls in the early days of telephones, so the phone company used to charge a flat monthly rate for service.
In 1910 the train fare from New York to Philadelphia was $4.50. A phone call between the same two cities was 80 cents.
As a tribute to Alexander Graham Bell when he died in 1922, all the telephones stopped ringing for one full minute.
In 1956 the first transatlantic telephone cable was placed on the ocean floor and rests as deep as 12,000 feet! It runs from Newfoundland, Canada to Scotland!
1900 – First coin telephone installed.
1951 – First long distance phone call without directory assistance.
1968 – First 911 system was introduced in the United States.
1971 – First commercially viable answering machine.
1985 – Cellular car phones introduced.
1988 – Auto-Dialing phone cards introduced.
Alexander Graham Bell originally wanted the greeting for the telephone to be “Ahoy” but Thomas Edison voted for “Hello,” a word he coined in 1877.
The original name of the telephone was the harmonic telegraph.
It took a year to connect the first line from New York to San Francisco. 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles were needed to link the country.
Globally, about $1 trillion is spent annually on telecommunications products and services.
One million threads of fiber optic cable can fit in a tube 1/2″ in diameter.
The telephone is the most used piece of communication equipment in the world.
The longest phone cable is a submarine cable called FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe). It spans 16,800 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom and can carry 600,000 calls at a time.
The telephone is the most profitable invention in US history.