Talking on the phone

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), a speech and hearing therapist, put his interest

in sound and communication together with telegraphic technology to build an

experimental telephone in 1876.

Bell, a Scottish immigrant to the United States, founded the Bell Telephone Company

to build and market his invention. By the early twentieth century, the phone was

becoming an everyday convenience.

In 1977, the U.S. electronics company Motorola developed a wireless telephone that

connected with the public telephone network through a system of short-range radio

cells. In the twenty-first century, personal cellphones — which continue to get smaller

and less expensive — are everywhere and threaten to replace traditional landline

phones.

Sending radio waves

At the end of the nineteenth century, Italian-born inventor Gugliemo Marconi

demonstrated that radio waves could be used to send signals without wires. In 1901,

he successfully sent a wireless telegraph signal all the way across the Atlantic Ocean

from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada. Marconi won the Nobel Prize for

physics in 1909.

By adding voice-signal technology developed for the telephone by Bell (more about

him in the previous section) and by American inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931) for

his innovative phonograph, engineers turned radio communication into a voice-

transmission system for ships and airplanes. Radio also became an entertainment

medium as businesspeople saw it as a way to publicize their products. Advertisers

began sponsoring music, news, drama, and comedy programs as affordable receivers

allowed more and more people to tune in. People over vast distances joined as a

common audience for this new experience.

Radio gave birth to television. In the 1920s, inventors in the U.S. came up with devices

for sending electronic pictures using radio waves. Philo T. Farnsworth invented an

electronic picture scanning system in 1922, and Vladimir K. Zworkin followed with the

television camera and picture tube in 1923. By the middle of the twentieth century,

these devices brought huge and growing audiences a form of instantaneous mass

togetherness beyond any precedent in history.