iPhone, BlackBerry – and Bell?
Ah, technology! .It’s hard to believe that three decades back phone calls to and from India were like precious gold, grudgingly meted out. Immigrants in America would call their families in India, yelling across the crackling wires, hardly hearing each other on messed up, faint connections, and paying big bucks for the privilege. Now you can call India any time, and thanks to services like Skype, pay nothing. And everyone in India, even the fruit seller, has a mobile phone – or so it seems.
BlackBerries and Apples are much more than fruit nowadays – they are our very lifeline to the larger world outside. We love our BlackBerries and our iPhones – sometimes I think our cell phones are just another of our body parts!
So today on Jan 25, it’s hard to believe that on yet another Jan 25 – in 1915 to be precise – Alexander Graham Bell, first inaugurated US transcontinental telephone service. Thanks to Bell, we can leave home and still be connected!
At the same time, can you imagine a world devoid of our little buzzing devices, no email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no text messages on the run? Not even old-fashioned landlines?
Such a world did exist as the New York Times recorded in its Jan 25, 1915 issue:
On Jan. 25, 1915, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, inaugurated U.S. transcontinental telephone service.
On October 9, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson talked by telephone to each other over a two-mile wire stretched between Cambridge and Boston. It was the first wire conversation ever held. Yesterday afternoon the same two men talked by telephone to each other over a 3,400-mile wire between New York and San Francisco. Dr. Bell, the veteran inventor of the telephone, was in New York, and Mr. Watson, his former associate, was on the other side of the continent. They heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago.
You can read the rest of the article in The New York Times
Other big technology breakthroughs on Jan 25:
1959 American Airlines opened the jet age in the United States with the first scheduled transcontinental flight of a Boeing 707.
1961 President John F. Kennedy held the first presidential news conference carried live on radio and TV.
Wonder what The New York Times will write on Jan 25 in 2025 and 2050? Will FB and Twitter still be around? Will iPhone? Will BlackBerry? Ah, the uncertainties – and mysteries of life!
