One of the oldest words used to greet is holla, an interjection from the beginning of the 16th century that also meant “Stop!”, which came from an even older French word: holà. We can find out why everyone uses the word “Hello” when answering the phone in just the following footage!
The inventor of the world’s first telephone
Like many other innovations, the idea of inventing a telephone appeared long before its first date. Antonio Meucci was first credited with a telephone in 1849, followed by Charles Bourseul, who designed another telephone model in 1854. However, the one who patented the idea, and who you’ve probably heard of by now, is Alexander Graham Bell, who won the first patent for this device, precisely in 1876.
Graham Bell had started his research as early as 1874 and, helped by some investors from that time, he managed to lay the foundations of the first telephone . From then on, things started to take off. In the years 1877-1878, the first telephone line, therefore the first switchboard, was built. Just three years later, 49,000 phones were in operation worldwide, but calls could only be made over short distances.
Don’t imagine, however, that these phones were a form of personal property, because they were, at the time, public. Also, the connection between them was made only with the help of power stations.
By 1900, over 600,000 telephones were registered in the telephone system invented by Bell. Their number reached 2.2 million by 1905 and 5.8 million by 1910.
How the first word spoken when answering the phone originated
Bell wanted the formula to open a long-distance discussion to be the word “ahoe”, used by sailors to stop a ship, but this version did not catch on with the public at all. A year later, in 1877, Thomas Edison was asked by the director of a local telegraph company in Pittsburgh at the time of the adoption of the telephone, “What would be an appropriate greeting to begin a telephone conversation?”. Then, Edison used the appellation used by the English when hunting foxes: “Alooo”.
A letter written by Edison himself was discovered in which he said: “Hello is the telephone greeting used over long distances, being the easiest to hear.”
Let’s find out together who invented the mobile phone and how the first wireless cellular connection was possible!
The inventor of the mobile phone
Martin (or Marty) Cooper, an American engineer born in 1928, is the one who, together with a whole team of specialists, invented the mobile phone. That is why he is also called the father of the mobile phone.
Cooper joined the US Navy, serving during the Korean War. After the war, he was employed by the Teletype Corporation, and in 1954 he began working at Motorola. There, Cooper worked on numerous projects involving wireless communications, such as the first radio-controlled traffic light system, which he patented in 1960, and the first portable police radios, the stations still used by law enforcement and today, which were introduced in 1967. He was later named vice president and director of research and development for Motorola.
Cell phones had been introduced by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1946. However, the biggest drawback of cell phones at that time was their limited coverage. Another weakness of the rudimentary devices was that they needed power, which could only be provided from car batteries. We are therefore talking about car mobile phones, not classic mobile phones.
In 1947, AT&T Bell Laboratories engineers W. Rae Young and Douglas H. Ring demonstrated that more mobile phone users could be added to the network by breaking up a large area into many smaller cells. However, the coverage needed to do this was unavailable at the time due to the lack of technology.
In 1968, the US Federal Communications Commission asked AT&T for a plan to use part of the UHF (ultrahigh frequency) television band. AT&T then proposed a cellular architecture to expand its car phone service.
Motorola’s nightmare would have been for AT&T to have a monopoly on cell phones, which would have put it out of business. That is precisely why Cooper was urgently put in charge of the mobile phone development project. He believed that the mobile phone should not be tied to the car, but should be portable. The result soon came in the form of a phone that was 23 cm tall and weighed 1.1 kg. The DynaTAC phone allowed 35 minutes of talk time before its battery was completely discharged.
On April 3, 1973, Cooper presented the first mobile phone independent of a car at a press conference in New York. To make sure it would work, before the press conference he called Joel Engel, head of the rival project at AT&T, and told him he was holding a portable cell phone. So that was the first mobile phone call ever made.
In 1983, after several years of further development, Motorola introduced the first portable consumer mobile phone, the DynaTAC 8000x. Despite its $3,995 price tag, the phone was a hit.