Telecommuting

“ You might beat the crowd in the most obvious way—by becoming a do-it-yourself telecommuter, perhaps without even leaving your present job. “Wired to Work” will explain. You’ll also learn how your company might benefit from large-scale telecommuting. Even small firms can come out ahead. A growing translation service in Washington, D.C., squeezed into the basement of the owner’s home, lends tiny Radio Shack computers to workers.
Telecommuting may very well help your firm reduce real estate costs; hire better people, clerical and professional ”

“ Large companies, of course, could mix different forms of telecommuting and employment arrangements. They might even let some workers shift back and forth. Some employees, some of the time, anyway, would work at home, while others might be at companies’ regional or neighborhood telecommuting centers of one kind or another. ”

“ InfoWorld quoted an ESU official.
That might have been stretching it. In 1984 only several thousand 201people were full-time telecommuters on a payroll. But Jack M. Nilles, coiner of the word “telecommuting,” said the number may have reached twenty thousand if you included other people. [59] Lone individuals, stockbrokers, even a software house organized “on-line,” were trying it. And Nilles, a future studies researcher at the University of Southern California, was predicting perhaps as many as ten million wired workers by 1990. He said most of the ten million would telecommute only part time. ”

“ Telecommuting isn’t for every worker or every company. American bureaucracies, however, public and private, are not yet tapping the full potential of telecommuting. As far back as 1970 Commerce Department statistics showed that half of American workers dealt in information, whether it was travel agenting, technical writing, or filling out 10K forms.
Match those statistics with Jack Nilles’s estimate that more than 2022.5 million nonfarmers in the United States already work at home, and you can appreciate telecommuting’s prospects. ”

“ That’s the term for the hardware and software that lets machines talk to each other. A network can be a local network, linking machines within the same office, or it can be national or even global. Someday, if they haven’t already, Bell and other companies may develop software especially meant for corporate networks of telecommuters.
While widespread telecommuting isn’t yet a reality, Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz have come as close as anyone to realizing its full benefits. They live in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and as they’re fond of pointing out, “We don’t commute. ”

“ The program could delight a wife whose husband holds a steady job with good health insurance and other benefits. On the other hand, the arrangement could be bad news for a worker depending on the telecommuting for his or her main income. Significantly, women head most single-parent households.
4. The keyers may not be sharing the experiment’s rewards fifty-fifty. Excluding minor administrative expenses, the telecommuters’ services cost the firm $47.40 a day on the average, minus whatever profit the company may make off the terminals it rents to the workers. ”

“ Give his older brother a telephone receiver, some wire and bits of brass, and he will make a wireless telegraph outfit and listen to a steamship hundreds of miles away spell out its message to the shore.
The wireless outfit is not a symbol, but something that you can both hear and see in operation even though you may not understand the whispering of the dots and dashes. And as soon as the mystery of this modern wonder more firmly grips your imagination, you perhaps may come to realize that we are living more and more in the age of electricity and mechanism. ”

“ Millions of messages going in all directions, crossing and recrossing one another, as is done every day by wire, are probably an impossibility by wireless telephony. Weird and little-understood conditions of the ether, static electricity, radio disturbances, make wireless work uncertain, and such a thing as twenty-four-hour service, seven days in the week, can probably never be guaranteed. In radio communication all must use a common medium, and as its use increases, so also do the difficulties. The privacy of the wire is also lacking with the wireless telephone. ”

“ Already, by cable, telegraph, and telephone, no two towns in the civilized world are more than one hour apart. We have even girdled the earth with a cablegram in twelve minutes. We have made it possible for any man in New York City to enter into conversation with any other New Yorker in twenty-one seconds. We have not been satisfied with establishing such a system of transportation that we can start any day for anywhere from anywhere else; neither have we been satisfied with establishing such a system of communication that news and gossip are the common property of all nations. ”

“ That wonderful Force that has power to overcome space, save or slay. It is intelligent, can talk over the ocean and under it, talk with wires, and if a wire hain't handy it will take a beam of light and talk on that, and it can git along without either one, for here is the biggest wireless telegraph station ever built; visitors can talk on it from city and city, jest throwin' their words out into the air and this onseen agency carries 'em along to the one sent to and nobody else—wonderful hain't it? ”

“ FIG. 153.—The aerial system of a transatlantic station.
The wireless telephone enables a passenger on board ship to communicate direct with his home by relaying the message over the line wires. By the same means the captain of a ship can call his home office and communicate with the owner of the vessel.
Telegraphs and telephones are the nerves of the world, carrying swift messages from its brain centers to its hands, annihilating distance in thought. All differences between men as individuals and people as nations can be traced to the lack of close contact. ”

“ In America it is already largely used but the old country moves more slowly in these latter days and leaves the younger nations to go "full steam ahead." As with the telephone, still run by private enterprise, so it is with wireless telegraphy, which is bridging over the human silence of the great waters, independent of storm or wind, truly one of the most wonderful developments of a wonderful age. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The telephone will almost certainly prove a very potent auxiliary indeed to the forces making for diffusion. At present that convenience is still needlessly expensive in Great Britain, and a scandalously stupid business conflict between telephone company and post-office delays, complicates, and makes costly and exasperating all trunk communications; but even under these disadvantages the thing is becoming a factor in the life of ordinary villadom. ”

“ Wireless telegraphy is part of the established order of things. The wireless telephone is practical for limited distance, but is not a commercial rival of the telegraph. Great distances are claimed, but they are matters for proof and speculation.
There is no immediate possibility that wireless telephony will take the place of local exchanges. If the time ever does come that it in any way tends to supplant the line telephone for some uses, it is more than probable that each subscriber must have his own generating station and call up direct. ”

“ There is a very decided field of opportunity for wireless telephony for long-distance work. The present systems of long-distance wires are very expensive to construct and maintain, and are subject to the whims of storms and the elements. ”

“ In such a sense many of the most common modern conveniences of life would have seemed impossible a century ago. To travel with safety sixty miles an hour, to talk through the telephone with a friend an hundred miles away, to receive intelligible messages across the Atlantic by a cable, and, still more, to communicate by wireless telegraphy would have seemed impossible until recently. ”

“ All the power that creates this artificial daylight is generated at a single station, and let flow to twenty-five storage centres. Minute by minute, its flow is guided by an expert, who sits at a telephone exchange as though he were a pilot at the wheel of an ocean liner. ”

“ Then came the electric telegraph which not only revolutionized all forms of signalling but almost annihilated distance. Messages and all sorts of communications could be flashed over the wires in a few minutes and when a cable was laid under the ocean, continent could converse with continent as if they were next door neighbors.
The men who first enabled us to talk over a wire certainly deserve our gratitude, all succeeding generations are their debtors. To the man who enabled us to talk to long distances without a wire at all it would seem we owe a still greater debt. ”

“ Bell himself was perhaps the first to see the future of the telephone exchange. In a letter written to some English capitalists in 1878, he said: "It is possible to connect every man's house, office or factory with a central station, so as to give him direct communication with his neighbors.... It is conceivable that cables of telephone wires could be laid underground, or suspended overhead, connecting by branch wires with private dwellings, shops, etc., and uniting them through the main cable with a central office." ”

“ No sooner was one problem solved than another presented itself. What to do with the constantly increasing number of wires was a pressing difficulty. All telephone circuits had been strung overhead, and with the demand for telephones for office and residence rapidly increasing, the streets of the great cities were becoming a perfect forest of telephone poles, with the sky obscured by a maze of wires. Poles were constantly increased in height until a line was strung along Wall Street in New York City at a height of ninety feet. ”

“ To use the language of the money-market, there was a temporary “slump” in cable shares. The world again woke up—this time to the fact that experiments of which it had heard faintly had at last culminated in a great triumph, marvellous in itself, and yet probably [Pg 9] nothing in comparison with the revolution in the transmission of news that it heralded.
The subject of Wireless Telegraphy is so wide that to treat it fully in the compass of a single chapter is impossible. ”

“ No such trouble can occur with wireless telegraphy, and if it becomes necessary to move a wireless station with great rapidity, as for instance on an unexpected advance of the enemy, it is an advantage to have no wire to bother about. ”

“ Wireless telephones will not only transmit the speech more clearly and distinctly, but have the further advantages that the initial cost is very much lower than that of wire lines, the maintenance is almost nil in comparison, the depreciation is smaller, the number of employees required is less, and a break-down is limited to the inside of the station, where it could be quickly remedied by the substitution of a duplicate spare piece of apparatus. ”

“ That is why any wireless receiving station, within a certain radius, can catch any messages that may be flying through the air--that is unless certain apparatus is tuned, or adjusted, to prevent this."
"Well, once the impulses, or electric currents, are sent out into space, all that is necessary to do is to break, or interrupt them at certain intervals, to make dots, dashes and spaces. These make corresponding clicks in the telephone receiver which the operator at the receiving station wears on his ear. ”

“ Since 1903, wireless has made possible the radio, the wireless telephone, and now television. Is it not probable that the future holds other great marvels, one day to become commonplace-perhaps in God's Kingdom! ”

“ Having now concluded a rough outline of the practical working of the electric telegraph, it is necessary that we should state—as an important fact on which we offer no comment—that the Company has made arrangements with all the railway companies for working their wires, excepting with the South-Eastern, and, accordingly, that the electric communication between London and Dover is worked by itself, and without connexion with the general system. ”

“ Indeed, most of them can and do work the key with one hand while they eat their lunch with the other; and the call or signal for his office will instantly awaken him from a sleep which a cannon-shot would not disturb. Telegraphy, in a word, develops a sort of sixth sense, and the experienced operator receives or sends a message as readily as he talks or reads or writes. It is second nature. ”

“ Preece, the electrician to the Post Office, said that the automatic transmitter “is an instrument of great delicacy and great power; it is now used to an enormous extent in this country, and it is one that we are improving every day. For instance, while about this time last year we were able to transmit all our news to Ireland at the rate of 60 words a minute, we are now doing it with ease at the rate of 150 words a minute; and with the improvements which we have now in hand, we shall be able next year to transmit nearly 200 words a minute.” ”

“ Wireless telephony, like wireless telegraphy, but to an even greater extent, is peculiarly suited for the conveyance of marine intelligence. Wireless telephony occupies a unique position in this regard-no operator is required. The additional expense of an operator is an objection to the wireless telegraph in many cases, and forbids its installation. Anybody can operate the wireless telephone. It is also much quicker-words can be spoken more rapidly than they can be put into Morse signals and translated. ”