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Telephony History

1825 -British inventor William Sturgeon introduced the electromagnet, a device that laid the foundations  for  electronic communications.
1830 - American, Joseph Henry demonstrated the potential of Sturgeon's device for long distance communication by sending an electronic current over one mile of wire to activate an electromagnet which caused a bell to strike. Thus the electric telegraph was born.
1835 -  Samuel Morse proved that signals could be transmitted by wire. He used pulses of current to deflect an electromagnet, which moved a marker to produce written codes on a strip of paper - the invention of Morse Code.
May 24, 1844 -  The message, "What hath God wrought?" sent  by "Morse Code" from the old Supreme Court chamber in the United States Capitol to his partner in Baltimore, officially opened the completed line and was the first news dispatched by electric telegraph.
March 3,1847 - Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland
1858  - First Atlantic telegraph cable completed but failed after 26 days due to the voltage being too high.
1866 - Permanent communication is established by wire from the United States to Europe with the completion of the second Atlantic telegraph cable.
1869 - Elisha Gray  and Enos N. Barton formed Gray and Barton, a small manufacturing firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. Three years later, the then Chicago-based firm was renamed the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. By 1880, it was the largest electrical manufacturing company in the United States, noted for its production of a variety of electrical equipment, including the world's first commercial typewriters, telegraph equipment and Thomas A. Edison's electric pen.
Feb. 14, 1876 -  Both Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell submitted patents applications for the invention of the telephone. Bell put in his patent application just hours before Gray filed one. Gray and  Bell entered into a  legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell won.
March 10,1876  - Alexander Graham Bell's notebook entry  describes his successful experiment with the telephone. Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell utters these famous  words, "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you."
1877 - Construction of the first regular telephone line from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts was completed.
1878 -  was the first regular telephone exchange, established in New Haven, Connecticut with 21 subscribers
1880 - The first telephone pay stations (not coin boxes but attended telephones) are opened in New York.  By the end of 1880, there were 47,900 telephones in the United States.
1881 - When the growth of the telephone network was outstripping the capacity of smaller suppliers, American Bell purchased a controlling interest in Western Electric and made it the exclusive developer and manufacturer of equipment for the Bell telephone companies.
March 11, 1891 - Almon Strowger was issued a patent  for the first automatic telephone exchange.
January 17, 1882 - Leroy Firman received the first patent for a telephone switchboard.
1877 - The first switchboard was set up in Boston
1892 - The first exchange using the Strowger switch was opened in La Porte, Indiana and initially subscribers produce the required number of pulses by tapping a button on their telephone
1892  - Service between New York and Chicago started, service between New York and Boston started in 1894
1895  - Northern Electric and Manufacturing is founded, supplying telecommunications equipment (Nortel)
1896 - An associate of Strowgers' invented the rotary dial in which replaced the single tap button.
1903  - Coin collecting pay telephones are introduced in New York, The collector was a single slot model and the charge for a local call was ten cents.
1907 - Theodore N. Vail combined the AT&T (formerly American Bell) and Western Electric engineering departments into a single organization that, in 1925, would become Bell Telephone Laboratories.
June 15, 1911  -  In operation since 1888, IBM (International Business Machines) is incorporated.
April 7th 1927  - A public demonstration of television by wire from Washington, D.C. to Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City was made on .
September 26th 1927 - The first color photographs sent over wire from San Francisco to New York,
1934 -  Congress established the FCC to regulate communication by wire and radio.
1940 - Broad band carrier systems are introduced allowing for simultaneous calls over a single pair of wires.
1941 -The first touch-tone system that used tones in the voice frequency range rather than pulses generated by rotary dials was installed in Baltimore, MD.
1946  - First commercial multi-channel high frequency microwave radiotelephone system in Bell System is introduced in southern California as well as between Nantucket (MA) and the mainland.
December 1947 - Three members of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley discovered the transistor effect and developed the first device in transistor  technology.

1947 - The first 'computer bug' is found when a moth is found trapped between relay points of the Mark II Aiken Calculator

1956 - AT&T signed a consent decree to settle a antitrust suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. The decree limited Western Electric to manufacturing equipment for the Bell System and contract work for the government, so Western quickly sold its small non-telephone subsidiary Westrex to Litton Industries and its holdings in Northern Electric (now known as Nortel Networks) to the public.
1958 - Bell System's Data-Phone service, which permits high-speed transmission of data over regular telephone circuits is announced in January. On June 25th, the FCC directs AT&T to cut its rates for privately leased telephone circuits by about 15 percent.
October 4, 1957 - Soviet Union launches Sputnik.
1959 - Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Camera, came up with a solution to the problem of large numbers of components, and the integrated circuit was developed.
1960 - Telephone calls are switched for the first time by computers, ending the need for people to do switching.
1962 - Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections.
1963 -  Telstar II is placed in orbit on May 7th in order to learn how to overcome the effects of radiation which permanently disabled Telstar on February 21st.
1965  - The number of independent telephone companies dropped to 2,535 from the 2,675 in existence at the start of 1964
1965  - Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate
1968 - OBTW replaced his first 51A lamp
1969 - Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or Arpanet)
1972 - The first e-mail program was created by Ray Tomlinson of BBN
1975 - The first prototype was being tested. A few more years were spent on technical development, and in 1978 TCP/IPv4 was released.
It would be some time before it became available to the rest of us. In fact, TCP/IP was not even added to Arpanet officially until 1983.
August 1975 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft.
1976  - AT&T installs its first digital switch.  Apple Computer is founded.
April 1976 - Stephen Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ron Wayne sign an agreement that founds Apple Computer
1979 and 1980 - The FCC conducted Computer Inquiry I and II, which restricted AT&T from selling enhanced services, except through a fully separated AT&T subsidiary. That subsidiary, American Bell (later called AT&T Information Systems), began operations on Jan. 1, 1983.
1981 - IBM introduces the desktop personal computer (IBM PC).
July 1981 - Microsoft acquires complete rights to Seattle Computer Product’s DOS (Disk Operating System) and names it MS-DOS.
November 1985 -  Microsoft releases Windows 1.0
Oct. 1986 - Commercial Communications of Turner, Maine opened for business under the ownership of Merritt Morris
1986 - The National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet
1988 - The first transatlantic fiber optic cable is completed
1989 - In an effort to index the Internet an archiver for ftp sites named Archie .was created by Peter Deutsch and his crew at McGill University in Montreal
1989  - Another significant event took place in making the Internet easier to use. Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory proposed a new protocol for information distribution based on hypertext--a system of embedding links in text to link to other text.  This protocol, would become known as the World Wide Web
1991 - Bell Labs develops photonic switching
1992 - The first color motion videophone introduced in the United States.
1993  - Development of the first graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen and his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)   Andreessen was the brains behind Netscape
1993 - The first digital mobile network is established in the U.S. (Los Angeles) while the first all digital cellular network is brought up in Orlando, FL
May 1995 - All pretenses of limitations on commercial use disappeared when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of the Internet backbone, and all traffic relied on commercial networks. AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online.
August 1995 - Internet Explorer 1.0 is released.
1995- Pioneers of VoIP, Vocaltec's Internet Phone software is released, which was perhaps the first "true" VoIP software application.
August 1996 -  Microsoft releases Windows NT (New Technology) 4.0
February 1996 - The soon-to-be-spun-off systems and technology unit of AT&T renamed itself Lucent Technologies
1996 - Linux  / SuSE  releases their first version 4.2.
Sept. 30, 2000 - The AT&T/Lucent spun off its enterprise networking group starting the new company - Avaya Inc.
October 2001 -  Microsoft releases Windows XP
 

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