145 years ago today, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell said into his experimental device “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” Thomas Watson, his assistant, sitting in an adjacent room at 5 Exeter Place, Boston, answered: “Mr. Bell, do you understand what I say?”
Alexander Graham Bell in 1892, making the first call between New York and Chicago. (Photo by © ... [+]
Later that day, Bell wrote to his father (as Edwin S. Grosvenor and Morgan Wesson recount in Alexander Graham Bell): “Articulate speech was transmitted intelligibly this afternoon. I have constructed a new apparatus operated by the human voice. It is not of course complete yet—but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel I have at last struck the solution of a great problem—and the day is coming when telegraph [i.e., telephone] wires will be laid to houses just like water or gas—and friends converse with each other without leaving home.”
Bell, whose research on hearing and speech led him to experiment with the transmission of sound by means of electricity, was prescient. By 1891, there were 200,000 phones in use in the U.S., a number that grew rapidly to 10,046,000 in 1914 (92 million people lived in the U.S. in 1910, 54% in rural areas). On January 25, 1915, Bell inaugurated the first trans-continental telephone service in the United States with a phone call from New York City to Thomas Watson in San Francisco. Bell repeated the words of his first-ever telephone call. In 1915, Watson replied, “It would take me a week to get to you this time.”
The telephone was adopted enthusiastically in the U.S., but there were doubters elsewhere, questioning its potential to re-engineer how businesses communicated. In 1879, William Henry Preece, inventor and chief engineer for the British Post Office, could not see the phone succeeding in Britain because he thought the new technology could not compete with cheap labor: “There are conditions in America which necessitate the use of such instruments more than here. Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys, and things of that kind… The absence of servants has compelled Americans to adopt communication systems.”
The eventual success of the telephone in Britain (and other countries) led to the disappearance of messengers, and the long-distance version of the telephone service led to the demise of telegraph operators. Expectations about its impact on the organization of business and the way work is performed came true. A 1914 Scientific American article titled “Action at a Distance” predicted that “A man in charge of many business interests might sit at his study and communicate accurately, rapidly and effectively with them all far more successfully than he could by passing from one office to another… and generally endeavoring to convey his own body where he really needs to convey only his own ideas.”
View of telephone operators at the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania switchboard exchange, ... [+]
The telephone, while destroying some jobs, created new occupations such as the telephone operator. But this popular job among young women eventually became the victim of yet another invention. 130 years ago today, on March 10, 1891, Almon Brown Strowger, an American undertaker, was issued a patent for his electromechanical switch to automate telephone exchanges. He had a practical reason for inventing the automatic switchboard—his telephone operator was the wife of a business rival, and he was sure that she was diverting business from him to her husband. And so he “devised what he called a ‘girl-less, cuss-less’ telephone exchange” according to Steven Lubar in InfoCulture.
There was a much broader practical reason for the adoption of automated switching as the growth in the size of the telephone network would have required at some point a very large number of operators. “A general characteristic of networks is that the links increase combinatorially with the number of nodes,” writes Ithiel de Sola Pool in Forecasting the Telephone, quoting an early phone company manager that all he had to do was “to get enough subscribers and the company would go broke.”
The first automatic switchboard was installed in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892, but they did not become widespread until the 1930s. By 1936, 48% of U.S. phones were on automated exchanges. Anticipating future reactions to some of the inventions of the computer age, phone customers did not react with enthusiasm to having to perform some of the work that was previously done by operators. But AT&T’s top-notch PR machine got over that inconvenience by predicting that before long, more operators would be needed than there were young women suitable for the job. Both AT&T and its users were ambivalent about switching to automatic switching. While users were not happy about working for no pay for the phone company, they also valued the privacy accorded to them by the automatic switchboard. And AT&T was interested in preserving its vast investment in operator-assisted switching equipment.
The transistor, invented in 1946 at AT&T to improve switching, led to the rise and spread of computerization, and to making the switching system essentially a computer. By 1982, almost half of all calls were switched electronically. The transistor also took computerization from the confines of deep-pocketed corporations and put it in hands of hobbyists, and later, in the pockets of billions around the world.
When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, it was sold in the U.S. only with AT&T contracts. This ultimate “convergence” of communications, computing, and media, the “smart phone,” was born into a very rich and very welcoming environment, the World Wide Web. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and made popular by Netscape in 1995, it provided a fertile ground for entrepreneurs—in startups and established companies—for growing the applications that will generate insatiable demand, adding more and more reasons to join and participate in the global information network that was created on top of the internet, itself a cheap (“free”) add-on to the pervasive telephone network Bell envisioned more than a century before.
In 1993, just at the cusp of this new era of communications, AT&T released a video showing its vision of the future. It got many things right, including video conferencing, paying tolls without stopping and reading books on computers. What it missed, similar to future visions from other large computing and communications companies at the time such as IBM and DEC, was how to get there. The vision of these companies for how to make these old-new predictions a reality was “let’s-use-a-heavy-duty-access-device-to-find-or-get-costly-information-from-centralized-databases-running-on-top-of-an-expensive-network.” The only future possible was that of a large, expensive, global, multi-media, high-speed, “robust” network—an extension of their current business, building on their existing strengths and market position.
The exception to these visions of the future of computing of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the one produced by Apple in 1987, The Knowledge Navigator. It was also an extrapolation of the company’s existing business, and because of that, it portrayed a different future. In contrast to AT&T’s and IBM’s and DEC’s, it was focused on information and individuals. It featured a university professor, conducting his research work, investigating data and collaborating with a remote colleague, assisted by a talking, all-knowing “smart agent.” The global network was there in the background, but the emphasis was on navigating knowledge and a whole new way of interacting with computers by simply conversing with them, as if they were humans. No mobile phones, however, and certainly no Web, search engines, and social networks.
It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. More often than not, predictions reflect our wishes, the kind of future we desire. Executives in established companies, inventors and entrepreneurs, all want to will the future into what they want it to be.
