The Global Web of Wires, The Unseen Complexity of Telephony

“ Strictly speaking, the telephone only changes sound-waves into waves of electricity and back again. When two telephones are connected by means of a wire, they act in this way,—the first telephone changes the sound-waves it receives into electric impulses which travel along the wire until they reach the second telephone, here they are changed back to sound-waves exactly like those received by the first telephone. Accordingly, the listener in New York seems to hear the very tones of his friend who is speaking at the other end of the line, say, in Boston. ”

“ Bell knew perfectly well that the mechanism that could transmit all the complex vibrations of one sound could do the same for any sound, even that of speech. That experiment showed him that the complex apparatus he had thought would be needed to accomplish that long dreamed result was not at all necessary, for here was an extremely simple mechanism operating in a perfectly obvious way, that could do it perfectly. All the experimenting that followed that discovery, up to the time the telephone was put into practical use, was largely a matter of working out the details. ”

“ But on March 10, 1876, the new instrument actually talked. Watson, who was at the basement end of the wire, heard the disc say, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” He dashed up the three flights of stairs to the room in which Bell was. “I can hear you!” he cried. “I can hear the words!”
“Had I known more about electricity, and less about sound,” Bell is reported to have said, “I would never have invented the telephone.” He had come upon his discovery by the right path, but it was a path that very few men could ever have picked out. ”

“ Time has improved the first crude instrument," Mr. Hazen replied. "The initial principle of the telephone, however, has never varied from Mr. Bell's primary idea. Before young Watson tumbled into bed on that epoch-making night, he had finished the instrument Bell had asked him to have ready, every part of it being made by the eager assistant who probably only faintly realized the mammoth importance of his task. Yet whether he realized it or not, he had caught a sufficient degree of the inventor's excitement to urge him forward. ”

“ These and a multitude of other difficulties, constituting problems of the most intricate nature, impeded the progress of the telephone art, but American engineers, by persistent study, incessant experimentation, and the expenditure of immense sums of money, have overcome these difficulties. They have created a new art, inventing, developing, and perfecting, making improvements great and small in telephone, transmitter, line, cable, switchboard, and every other piece of apparatus and plant required for the transmission of speech. ”

“ To give the most efficient service, there will always need to be an expert to stand between it and the public.
As the final result of all these varying changes in switchboards and signals and batteries, there grew up the modern Telephone Exchange. This is the solar plexus of the telephone body. It is the vital spot. It is the home of the switchboard. It is not any one's invention, as the telephone was. It is a growing mechanism that is not yet finished, and may never be; but it has already evolved far enough to be one of the wonders of the electrical world. ”

“ It is not like anything else that either man or Nature has ever made. It defies all metaphors and comparisons. It cannot be shown by photography, not even in moving-pictures, because so much of it is concealed inside its wooden body. And few people, if any, are initiated into its inner mysteries except those who belong to its own cortege of inventors and attendants.
A telephone switchboard is a pyramid of inventions. If it is full-grown, it may have two million parts. It may be lit with fifteen thousand tiny electric lamps and nerved with as much wire as would reach from New York to Berlin. ”

“ These telephone girls are the human part of a great communication machine. They are weaving a web of talk that changes into a new pattern every minute. How many possible combinations there are with the five million telephones of the Bell System, or what unthinkable mileage of conversation, no one has ever dared to guess. But whoever has once seen the long line of white arms waving back and forth in front of the switchboard lights must feel that he has looked upon the very pulse of the city's life. ”

“ As one single company, the Bell Telephone Company, employs 16,000 operators, the problem is an expansive one, and it has bearing on the health of the employees as well as on the patience of the subscribers. But above all it refers to the economic interests of the company, inasmuch as every girl who satisfies the entrance conditions of hearing and sight, of school education and general personal appearance, receives some salary throughout the months of training in the telephone school. ”

“ It is an interlocking unit, a living, conscious being, half human and half machine; and an injury in any one place may cause a pain or sickness to its whole vast body.
And just as the particles of a human body change every six or seven years, without disturb-ing the body, so the particles of our telephone systems have changed repeatedly without any interruption of traffic. The constant flood of new inventions has necessitated several complete rebuildings. Little or nothing has ever been allowed to wear out. ”

“ Three million telephones are now scattered abroad in foreign countries, and seven millions are massed here, in the land of its birth.
So entirely has the telephone outgrown the ridicule with which, as many people can well remember, it was first received, that it is now in most places taken for granted, as though it were a part of the natural phenomena of this planet. It has so marvellously extended the facilities of conversation—that "art in which a man has all mankind for competitors"—that it is now an indispensable help to whoever would live the convenient life. ”

“ It is the telephone which does most to link together cottage and skyscraper and mansion and factory and farm. It is not limited to experts or college graduates. It reaches the man with a nickel as well as the man with a million. It speaks all languages and serves all trades. It helps to prevent sectionalism and race feuds. It gives a common meeting place to capitalists and wage-workers. It is so essentially the instrument of all the people, in fact, that we might almost point to it as a national emblem, as the trade-mark of democracy and the American spirit. ”

“ Perhaps the most noteworthy achievement of the telephone is its transformation of country life. In Europe, rural telephones are almost unknown, while in the United States one-third of all our telephone stations are in country districts. The farmer no longer depends upon the mails; like the city man, he telephones. This instrument is thus the greatest civilizing force we have, for civilization is very largely a matter of intercommunication. ”

“ The telephone has become a necessity of modern life, so that if through some means all the systems were destroyed business would be, for a time at least, paralysed. It is the perfection of the devices for connecting one subscriber with another, and for despatching the vast number of messages and calls at "central," that make modern telephony possible.
To handle the great number of spoken messages that are sent over the telephone wires of a great city it is necessary to divide the territory into districts, which vary in size according to the number of subscribers in them. ”

“ Before the close of 1878, men successful in other lines of industry perceived that if the crude and limited facilities offered by these early exchanges afforded a service esteemed by the public as a desirable convenience, then the manifold advantages that might be derived from a telephone exchange system embracing all the probable users of telephone service in a town or city, would be in direct ratio to the growth and expansion of that system. ”

“ Foreign telephone experts say that the American telephone system has no equal in scope and efficiency, which is a gratifying endorsement, in view of the fact that the foundations of this American transcontinental system were not laid by men long skilled in an established art, or men who wielded the power inherent in great financial resources, but by men who strove against the combined forces of complete absence of telephonic experience, practise and knowledge, of the destructive power of the elements, and of human greed that would publicly rob vested right and good name. ”

“ There is no racial reason for failure. The slow service and the bungling are the natural results of treating the telephone as though it were a road or a fire department; and any nation that rises to a proper conception of the telephone, that dares to put it into competent hands and to strengthen it with enough capital, can secure as alert and brisk a service as heart can wish. Some nations are already on the way. China, Japan, and France have sent delegations to New York City—"the Mecca of telephone men," to learn the art of telephony in its highest development. ”

“ How to get the benefits of organization without its losses, to become strong without losing quickness, to become systematic without losing the dash and dare of earlier days, to develop the working force into an army of high-speed specialists without losing the bird's-eye view of the whole situation,—these are the riddles of the new type, for which the telephonists of the next generation must find the answers. They illustrate the nature of the big jobs that the telephone has to offer to an ambitious and gifted young man of to-day. ”

“ But they do not keep pace with the demand. It is one of the oddest vagaries of public ownership that there is now in Tokio a WAITING LIST of eight thousand citizens, who are offering to pay for telephones and cannot get them. And when a Tokian dies, his franchise to a telephone, if he has one, is usually itemized in his will as a four-hundred-dollar property. ”

“ And they are not apt to remember that most of the delays and blunders are being made, not by the expert girls, but by the careless people who persist in calling wrong numbers and in ignoring the niceties of telephone etiquette. ”

“ When in the middle of the nineteenth century the human race had achieved a degree of development that made swift communication essential to the common life, the telegraph and the ocean cable were invented; or it might rather be said, the laws that make them possible were discerned, and were taken advantage of to utilize for this purpose. The constant developments in rapid transit, in the instantaneous conveniences of telephonic communication, and, latest of all, in wireless telegraphy, are all in the line of absolute correspondence with the advancing needs of humanity. ”

“ As of early 1996, the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecom monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. It is now a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet will become the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See also {network, the} and {Internet address}. ”

“ The scientists are enthusiastic. They talk of robustness and dumb networks with smart terminals. They talk of TCP/IP and HTML and decentralized systems that run on open protocols, so that anyone can connect to this network and use it any way they want to. You, of course, know nothing about the truly astounding outburst of creativity and communication that would actually flower on such a system, that would flower precisely because it is so open and no one country or company controls it or the protocols that run it. ”

“ We are, in other words, watching as the self‐assembled wireless net begins to cooperate thickly enough that even infrastructure builders may not have much work left to do. Combine that with ubiquitous SIP soft phones inside your PDAs, Internet tablets, laptops. Combine that with the reluctance of most people in the young generation to buy wire line telephone service anymore, and there’s a perfect storm being set up for the bandwidth merchants. ”

“ The infrastructure of the landline
networks may be so decrepit and backwards that it becomes easier
to simply skip over the landline system and go straight to the most
advanced possible cell network. Where people cannot afford those
phones, they combine resources so that an entire village may be
sharing a single phone, and, although the population may not as
a matter of course have access to computers, the phones become
their link to the Internet. ”

“ Nevertheless, if we consider the whole planet, universal access to information highways is far from the reality. Regarding basic telephony, teledensity varies from more than 60 phone lines per 100 inhabitants in the richest countries to less than one in the poorest countries. Fifty per cent of phone lines in the world are in northern America and western Europe. Half of the world's population has never used a phone.
In the developing countries, it is unlikely that Internet connections will use traditional phone lines, as there are other technological solutions. ”

“ In this corridor, the English and information and communication technology skills of the youth give them a competitive edge in call centers and other business process outsourcing.
In 2001, in this hall, we hailed ICT as a key growth sector. So we built up telecommunications infrastructure and opened the market for Internet phone calls. Today international calls cost 6 cents a minute, down from 40 cents. From 2,000 BPO workers in 2001, we now have 200,000. ”

“ Changes in technology are causing the convergence of much of telephony, data relay, and internet communications networks into an interconnected network of networks. The NCS and its National Coordinating Center shall support use of telephony, converged information, voice networks, and next generation networks for emergency preparedness and national security communications functions assigned to them in Executive Order 12472. ”

“ DoD must prepare to operate in a sub-6 5G ecosystem, which will require a shift in strategy and a consideration of where DoD is willing to share bandwidth in the sub-6 realm.
This shift may come with some inherent benefits. The anonymity that comes from utilizing the same infrastructure as any other company or country provides an industry-standard form of security all its own. Integration of government and civil use may provide a layer of security by allowing military traffic to “hide in plain sight” as traffic becomes more difficult to see and isolate. ”

“ In the inquiry, the Commission shall determine whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If the Commission's determination is negative, it shall take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market. ”