Phones

A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.

11 posts· 1876 – 1999

• BlackBerry 850: the device that made email check you 1999
• IBM Simon, or the first computer you could also make calls on 1994
• The DynaTAC 8000X, or the phone that finally left the car 1983
• Joel's handoff patent, or how the cellular network learned to keep a call alive 1972
• Touch-Tone: Bell's push-button phone and the day dialing became a command 1963
• The car phone, or how eighty pounds of vacuum tubes first put a telephone on the road 1946
• The call across the Atlantic, or how Rocky Point and Rugby shrank the ocean 1927
• The wheel that replaced the operator 1919
• The undertaker who put telephone operators out of a job 1892
• The New Haven exchange, or how a switchboard made from teapot lids wired a city 1878
• Bell's telephone, or how nine words traveled down a wire 1876