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January 30, 2003
Reading an old book by Albert North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher, Cambridge and Harvard. " . . . in 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in 212 B.C." Isn't that amazing? Math hadn't progressed in 1700 years one bit beyond the Greeks! But yet, as if to make up for lost time, starting around 1550 and ending around 1700, Gailileo, Kepler, Newton and others had figured out nearly every mechanical law of the universe. As Whitehead says, "The progress of civilization in not wholly a uniform drift toward better things." The book is Science and the Modern World, 1948, although developed from a series of lectures given in 1926.
January 22, 2003
There's too many wireless technologies to keep track of! True. But they can be broken down into two broad divisions, cellular radio and non-cellular radio. Click here for a very simple diagram. Does this help you keep the technologies organized? Please note, the chart does not describe the transmission types or access technologies, if you will, of the various non-cellular radio schemes.
January 21, 2003
My voice line and internet connection are back up and stable. I had so many problems that Pacific Bell, pardon me, SBC, thought they might have to install a new drop wire to my home. Turns out a corroded wire connection at the utility pole was the only problem. It's been cleaned up and everything is working well.
January 6, 2003
I've set up a page for Narain Gehani's important new work: Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel.(internal link) I've read and reviewed it and I recommend it very much. I wish it included photographs but the publisher is considering an on-line photograph gallery to complement the title. That would be a great addition to the book.
January 2, 2003
I answer all my e-mails but sometimes my replies bounce. Like the one below. That's frustrating, because the sender probably thinks that I am ignoring them and will consequently think poorly of me. So, I am posting this recent e-mail here, in the chance Paul might see it.
Tom: My name is Paul McCoy. I have been with C&P Telephone/Bell Atlantic/Verizon since 1966 in a variety of jobs. When I hired on, the safety motto said something to the effect of "No job is so important and no TASK is so urgent...." Somewhere along the line, the word task got changed to "service". Do you have access to a likenes of the old motto that contains the word "task" ? Nobody I tell this to remembers this or they don't believe me. You have a great web site! I just installed the Lineman painting as wallpaper on my computer. Regards, Paul
Paul: Thanks for the e-mail. The only Bell System safety handbook I have (Pacific/Nevada Bell) is from 1976. On the title page is what looks to be a photograph of a plaque that has the word service, not task. :-( Perhaps an older manual might contain it? You can try looking for one on http://www.abe.com. Or get in touch with a telephone collector on ebay.com. Ever tried posting a question to one of the many telecom discussion groups on the USENET? Try http://www.deja.com. I bet someone remembers although they may not know of an image. And how about the Telephone Pioneers? Sorry I couldn't help and thank you much for the compliments. Best regards, Tom Farley
December 2, 2002
Question: Tom: What's the difference between the electrical age and the electronics age?
Answer: Electrical age equipment manages electricity in the main, electronic equipment manages a specific property of electricity. The triode tube is the best example in telephone history of an electronic device. Previously, in the electrical age, signal strength losses could not be recovered. A signal fades as wire length increases, no matter how much conductor size or line power is increased. You may have a copper wire as thick as a pencil, or a 1,000 volt generator powering your long distance line, but, eventually, your signal will fade. These losses prevented nation wide telephone service until 1915 when an electronic device was employed: the triode tube, a true amplifier, one that created a stronger signal than the original source.
An electronic amplifier increases signal strength, albeit with some distortion. Check out my diagram here. Amplifying occurs within a triode tube when a cathode, much like the filament of a light bulb, is supplied current and becomes white hot. In a vacuum tube this boils off huge amounts of negative ions which are drawn to a positive source called the plate. Again, please see the diagram. In between these two elements, washed by the electron stream, stands a third, the grid, the supplier of the original, weak signal. Amplifying happens as the large, deliberately generated electron flow is gathered by the plate and then sent on. The original signal is now impressed upon the flowing stream and increases in strength as high as the plate voltage is set.
Telephone calls at the edge of understanding became clear. Trans-continental telephone calls, previously impossible, became routine. With electricity, we manipulate electricity as a whole. With electronics, we manage a specific part of electricity: we generate additional electrons and manage their flow. Electricity, the electrical age, electronics, the electron age.
November 20, 2002
Europe saw cellular service introduced in 1981, when the Nordic Mobile Telephone System (internal link) or NMT450 began operating in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway in the 450 MHz range. It was the first multinational cellular system. It was also close to being the first all digital cellular service. Unlike AMPS, which used digital routines and tones for signalling, NMT used all digital or binary signalling. No tones. NMT could have been a fully digital system with digitized voice, but technology for that hadn't quite developed. As Knut Flottorp expalins:
"NMT was before its time, fully digital, TDMA, on SS7 signalling. They did not make a voice codec that could work fast enough, nor would be affordable. So it was digital switching of analog voice. The system then had the benefit of extreme coverage -- where reception would degrade gracefully and cover as far as 25 miles."
For more on the hard to research NMT, click here to read Staffan Hultén's history of the project:
November 14, 2002
The Automatic Electric Company is still alive? Well, sort of. AG Communication Systems (external link), a subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, claims parentage of A.E. It thus marks the triumph of the now defunct Western Electric against its greatest and oldest rival, Automatic Electric. Which is also now defunct. It is as if two ghosts have finished a battle that their corporeal forms did not complete in life. Check out the time line below which comes from the A.G. site.
Rather than disappearing completely in the mid 1980s, remnants of GTE's manufacturing arm continued on, being absorbed by AG Communication Systems in 1989. The "A", by the way, stands for AT&T, and the "G" for General Telephone and Electronics. A.G. contains many old Western Electric elements, especially Lucent, which continues to manufacture telecom equipment, much to telephone companies formerly of the Bell System.
A.G.'s ownership settles a David and Goliath type battle that raged for nearly one hundred years. In this case, Goliath won, but it does not diminish the contributions A.E. made over the years, particularly with Strowger or step by step switching equipment. Steppers were the first workable system that allowed automatic dialing, letting people place calls without an operator. A.E.'s steppers let Automatic Electric and the independent telephone companies keep close to Bell System's subscribership levels until the early 1920s. Read more about these things in my telephone history series.
November 11, 2002
Almon Strowger is the father of automatic telephone switching (internal link). Caroline Densham from the United Kingdom writes:
"Hello, Tom. I thought you might be interested in the background of Almon Strowger. Did you know his family came from England ? My hobby is genealogy and I have just linked my family with Almon and his ancestors in Suffolk, England. He is my fourth cousin. Here's some background, starting with Almon's grandfather's decision to move to America."
"About 1790 John Strogier married Charlotte Jennings, daughter of a titled man who disowned her, and this is the most likely reason why he and his wife decided to emigrate. Although a son from a prosperous family, John would have had great difficulty succeeding in Suffolk where his marriage had offended his rich and influential father-in-law."."
"For whatever reason, they did move to America, landing in Norfolk, Virginia. Charlotte gave birth to a child either aboard ship or in Norfolk. Both mother and child died. After her death, John sold personal belongings which consisted of very expensive household goods and moved to Hudson, New York, where he worked for Gouldrite Oil Company for a year. He then married Margaret Scott and had six children the eldest being Samuel Strowger born June 14,1797 in Kinderhook, Columbia County, New York."
"Samuel married his second wife Jane Clark on January 1st, 1827 and Almon was christened on October 19, 1839 in Penfield, Monroe County, New York. Almon had a varied career commencing as a trumpeter in the Civil War. The 1860 census shows him as farm hand in Reserve Township, Parke County, Indiana. The 1880 census lists him as a teacher. In 1889 he was an undertaker. On August 31, 1891 Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company was founded with half the stock controlled by Almon Strowger and nephew Walter S Strowger. I hope you find these details of interest."
Best, Caroline Densham
Links:
http://www.roserpark.net/ (external link) Shows the grave of Almon Strowger
http://www.agcs.com/aboutv2/history/
index.htm (external link, now dead) History timeline at AGCS, showing how their company began with Strowger and his invention.
November 7, 2002
Interested in mobile telephone and cellular telephone history? Besides reading my long article on the subject, be sure to scan Joel Engel's and Donald Cox's oral interviews at the IEEE site. Cox and Engel are both former Bell System employees, both pioneers of cellular. Keep something in mind while you read. Because Bell System history is so well documented it is easy to think Bell Labs and Western Electric alone developed cellular. They did not. In America, Motorola contributed a great deal, providing much competition to the Bell System Around the world, the Scandinavians and the Japanese built cellular networks by themselves and in time frames slightly before AT&T's commercial systems. The Japanese company, Oki, not Western Electric, supplied the Bell System's car mounted cellular telephones.
Joel Engel:
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history
_center/oral_histories/transcripts/engel.html
Donald Cox:
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history
_center/oral_histories/transcripts/cox.html
October 31, 2002
Happy Halloween! A few years ago Northern Telecom, now Nortel, produced a great .pdf file on telephone basics called Telephony 101. They've pulled the document from their site but I have archived a copy here. It's 117 pages in .pdf format. Just slightly dated but worth a read, especially if you are a teacher or student and need a well written introduction to the telephone system. Thanks to NT for writing something so helpful. Click here to download the file; it's about 691K (internal link).
October 29, 2002
Have trouble understanding the logarithmic scale? It's what we base many electronic measurements on, including the decibel (internal link). This website gives a visual demonstration of the powers of ten:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java
/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.htm (external link)
You'll need a broadband connection to really enjoy the animation, and quite a bit of system memory. The pictures start out at a point in the universe at 10 to the 18th power. It then pulls back from that point to a place which is 10 to the negative 7 power. (Sorry, my web authoring program does not allow me use superscripts.) We go from a place beyond our imagination in the cosmos to the depth of a leaf surface, right down to the nucleoid level. Watch the place locations at the upper left while you watch the number of steps count down. I'm still not sure if you can grasp the dramatic changes that powers of ten produces, but I do congratulate the web site for providing us with another perspective.
Many people don't know how to conduct sound, authoritative research. The National Genealogical Society has published procedures which are entirely applicable to historical and scientific research. These standards are conservative and well thought out:
http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/
comstandards.htm (external link)
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