When was the last time you used a landline phone to make a long-distance call? If you're like me,
it s probably been a while. The New York Times noted that only about half of American
households had a landline phone in 2015, down from roughly 90 percent just eleven years earlier.
Today, the practice of picking up a phone wired to a wall-mounted jack seems simply passé, a relic
of a long ago past. If you want to get a hold of someone in the age of the Internet, you just pick
up your iPhone and use an app (maybe Skype, maybe FaceTime) to unlock portals of communication.
Yet, if we pause to consider two anniversaries the opening of the first commercial transatlantic
telephone service on January 7, 1927 made possible by the American Telephone and Telegraph
(AT&T) and the introduction of Apple's iPhone in January 9, 2007 It's worth considering how
today's transformative technologies still depend on the innovative infrastructure of the past.
After all, Steve Jobs iPhone clever as it is has no power without the technological breakthroughs
associated with AT&T's old landline technology. Without the cables that connect machines on the
Internet, the iPhone would be a dead hunk of plastic and rare earth metals. This new
technology is very much tethered to the past, to a web of lines that crisscross our nation and globe.
In fact, the real origins of the iPhone's power stem from the pioneering efforts of
communication innovators that preceded the AT&T engineers of the 1920s.
The story of wired long-distance communication really begins with the Western Union post-diggers
who laid the first American transcontinental telegraph in 1861 and with the Atlantic Telegraph
Company that dropped the first transatlantic telegraph cable into the Atlantic Ocean
in 1858. Here were developments that transformed global capitalism, allowing businesses in the
following decades to communicate commercial transactions swiftly over vast geographic spaces.
But even if American business had the means of communicating via telegraphs with European
business partners by the early twentieth century, prior to the 1920s, they did not have the ability
to actually talk with oversees partners via a phone. Yes, Alexander Graham Bell had invented
the telephone in 1876, and in 1915 he made the first transcontinental telephone call over AT&T
wires that extended over 3,000 miles from New York City to San Francisco. But by the early 1920s,
businessmen still had no effective way of having a telephone conversation across the Atlantic Ocean.
That's why that transatlantic phone call between AT&T president Walter Sherman Gifford and General
British Post Office official Sir Evelyn P. Murray on January 7, 1927 was so important. Finally,
American businesses could communicate in real-time by voice across the ocean with commercial partners
in Europe. And business exchanges began almost immediately after Graham and Murray finished
their initial chat, as heads of major firms got on the phone to talk trade. Some reports suggest
that over $6 million in business transactions transpired via voice communication on that day.
But even then, the communication revolution was still incomplete because that first call was
actually transmitted via radio waves through the air. Sure, the ability to send voice communication
from the US to Europe was a vast improvement over telegraphic correspondence, but radio
transmissions could be unreliable, contingent upon the proper weather conditions and other
factors that could affect the quality of wave signals sent thousands of miles across an ocean.
For capitalists seeking consistency in their everyday transactions, this was a real problem.
That problem was overcome in 1956, when AT&T, working with the British
Post Office and Canadian partners, laid the first transatlantic telephone cable
known as TAT-1, which was a plastic-insulated transmission system capable of sending underwater
telephonic signals from Newfoundland to Scotland. It had taken roughly thirty years to develop lines
with repeater technology that could boost voice signals at various intervals along transmission
routes, thereby ensuring that the volume of someone's voice on one end of the telephone line
did not diminish considerably by the time it got to its final destination. Finally, roughly
a century after the first transatlantic telegraph had connected the Old World with the New, AT&T
and its partners had found a way to make cabled voice communication across the pond possible.
This is Cleo Craig in New York calling Dr. hill in London. Good afternoon.
Hello.
Hello, Dr. Hill. Hello, Mr. Craig. This is Dr. Hill in London. Is that you, Mr. Craig?
This is Mr. Craig. Well, it's very good to hear your voice and to join with you and our friends
in Canada in inaugurating this, this, the first transatlantic telephone cable service.
Well, Mr. Craig, it's been a great day for those who for years have dreamt and
waited for this thing. Into it, as well you know, has gone the best from each country,
and only the best was good enough. but it's not too sentimental, I hope, to say that
as the people of our three countries use this cable more and more,
the ties of friendship and understanding between us will grow the stronger.
And this is where the story of the iPhone and AT&T
really fuse. AT&T took lessons learned about wired communication (lessons that in some ways
dated back to the telegraphic age of Western Union in the 1860s) to help construct a new
communication web that could allow computer systems to communicate with one another.
In 1969, when the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project s Agency
(DARPA) proposed connecting mainframe computers via a wired network called ARPANET,
AT&T helped build the connection between research facilities at Stanford, the University of Utah,
The University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Thus was born the primitive foundation of what we now know as the Internet.
Interestingly, the Department of Defense asked AT&T if they wanted to take over ARPANET
and manage it a few years later, but AT&T begged off. Nevertheless, AT&T
continued to lay cables, like the first transatlantic fiber-optic TAT-8 line,
which was a foundational channel that paved the way for global Internet transactions thereafter.
Today, we don t use many of the first transoceanic cables laid back in the day.
In a lot of places, we now have new fiber-optic cables that have replaced the older lines.
But, we nevertheless live in a world of webbed cables, one that owes its origins
to AT&T and Western Union's innovations years ago. Today, over 95 percent of all Internet
traffic between nations separated by oceans still goes through cables that are underwater.
So, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, calling it, quote,
a revolutionary product . . . that changes everything, endquote, he was only partially right.
No doubt, our world is very different because of Apple's signature phone, but Jobs creation is as
much a harbinger of the future as a product of the past. Our iPhones are still very much linked
to a buried history, one that may be under oceans, but nevertheless still connects our world today.