The telephone came about as scientists tried to squeeze more out of the telegraph.
They began to understand how to influence sound, and how to send it over longer and longer distances to more and more people.
Although the telephone itself hasn't really changed much in the last hundred years - and the telegraph's 'ons' and 'offs' live on in the binary codes used by today's digital technology - considerable adaption was needed to accomodate new devices like fax machines and modems.
The telephone combined the knowledge of how sound works together with a variable electric signal that could be sent over great distances.
Instead of the telegraph's ...
Cables and wires are the unsung heroes or 'facilitators' of the age of telecommunication. In the space of twenty years, cables changed from two mile long wooden troughs containing copper wire in grooves to cables that ...
Fibre optic cables are very different from copper ones. They carry light, not electricity, and have no need for a second cable for a 'return path'.
They can transport ...
The complexity of a network - telephone or computer - rises dramatically with the number of people connected to it. This was not something that had bothered people until the telephone became widespread, when it suddenly ...
One thing that has extended the use of the telephone system is the way that new machines, like computers and faxes, have been connected to the existing network - the cables and exchanges that form the telephone ...