It's easy to be carried away by technology for its own sake - the gee-whiz factor. Technology alone is all but useless. How much would you pay for a telephone with no connections?
It's the application - what you can do with it - that matters.
Here we examine how people learned to apply the new telecommunications technologies over the decades.
The story of the adoption of the telephone serves as a model for other new technologies since then.
People's perception of the usefulness of a product or service rises as its price falls. The cheaper it is, the more you can use it - and the more useful it becomes.
For more than 50 years telephone charges were high, not least because of a complex pricing system based on radial distances; the further you lived from the exchange, the more you paid for your line. This was progressively simplified and by 1935 the basic rental radius was a generous three miles - a distance which covered the vast majority of subscribers.
The tariff for calls was also rather involved, with every exchange having as many as ten radial distance bands for calls up to 100 miles, and further bands for every 40 miles thereafter! The number of bands reduced over the years, down to just eleven in the 1950s, and the introduction of subscriber dialling of trunk calls (STD) saw this number reduce just four - charged not from every single exchange but measured from main exchanges serving whole groups of local units.
The telephone transformed people's lives as it reached further and further into society.
This advertisement from the 1930s may seem odd today, but for many people the telephone suddenly made all the difference in the world.
David Stonier is a 71 year old retired chemist who grew up in Stockport, Cheshire, the son of the steel sawyer.
The family didn't have a phone, but there was a call box 200 yards around the corner. However, they seldom made use of it as all of his family lived in neighbouring streets.
He did start to use the phone as a teenager to talk to one or two friends, and he remembers how two old pennies in the phone box went a very long way.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.Eddie Donald, born in 1943, grew up in Fife, Scotland. His family had a phone at home to support his father's work as an engineering contractor.
He was always fascinated by how it worked, but soon learned the science behind it, after which it was just accepted as an everyday item.
Today he marvels at the advance of the technology over the last century and how this has brought a vast change in international telecommunications.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.Ann Smith was born in 1958 and grew up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, the daughter of a coal miner. Because the village where she lived was so close-knit, the family never had a phone until she went away to Newcastle University to study Jewish literature and New Testament studies, aged 18.
She remembers that having a phone was still a novelty even in 1976 and that the neighbours would come round to use and admire it, but it had a curious effect on her dad's manners.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.Alf Sawkins is a 56 year-old engineer who grew up in the centre of Birmingham. He married at the age of 23 and moved to the outskirts of the city, which is when he had his first telephone at home.
Telecommunications has altered his life and his work in a variety of ways since that first phone was installed.
He recalls how the arrival of fax introduced in business dramatically changed the way things were done.
Play the audio clip and view the transcript to learn more. A new window will open.