Poisoned Purple Pen

Connected

Fun Fact Friday! On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful call with the telephone. How much of a factor has the telephone (in all its forms) had in the difference between society now and 140 years ago?

Telephones have played a huge part in connecting the world to one another. It is one of those inventions that makes the world seem not so large when you can connect to others halfway around the world with the touch of a few buttons.

It must have been awfully exciting back in 1876 to be able to pick up a device and have your voice carry to another location. It's mind boggling to think that they had to have a switch board and operator who would connect the wires from one place to another. I faintly remember operators.

Phones went from a two piece system, where you held the ear portion and the mouth portion, to them being in one unit, and oh all those wires. Don't forget that the first phones were rotary as well, and if you didn't make sure you had the full range of motion, you'd wind up dialing another number. Hooray for the invention of push buttons.

I can clearly remember when my Grandfather's ugly brown wall phone was switched from rotary to push button. Oh man it was like heaven. Plus, he had an extra long cord that would allow me to move out of the way since the phone was placed right at the kitchen threshold. As a teen I lived on the telephone. I even have two pages of a scrapbook filled with different pictures of me on that phone!

It should be pretty obvious that I live with a cellphone as an extension of my right hand. We moved from corded phones to the cordless in 1968, though that trend would take a bit to become popular. With the help of the World Wide Web, cellphones were invented.

In 1992 I was a new mother and traveled to Lebanon for the very first time with my 2 month old son. I will never forget trying to make a phone call back to the US to talk to my mother. Because of the civil war, Lebanon was way behind the technological advancements everywhere else. I picked up the phone and had to wait up to 5 minutes for a dial tone. I couldn't even wrap my brain around that because I hardly ever waited for one in the States. Once the dial tone finally chimed, I had to call the operator and give her the number to the States I wanted to call. No more operators making calls anymore. We've evolved even further.

Now, it seems everyone has a cellphone, and with texting and video chat, you can talk to anyone - anywhere in the world. In the 1990's we could only afford to call R's mom once a month. We had to time the call for exactly 30 minutes because it cost $150. Can you imagine that? Now we live on whatsapp. Last year, R bought her a cellphone and now they talk every day.

It's pretty amazing to look back and see how far the phone has progressed. And how affordable it is. When I think back to the 80s version of that huge cellphone I can't stop laughing. Even my first cellphone in the 90s was heavy and oh so damn ugly. Motorola really pushed things along with that enormous phone in 1973.

I love the phone. I admit it. It has really shaped us, connected us to one another and cut those distances. I think that is the best part of the phone and cannot imagine where we'd be without it, especially for people like me who have family overseas.

Does anyone remember that commerical.....Reach out, reach out and touch someone? That's exactly what the telephone did. It let us reach out and touch someone, to stay connected. It's at the top of my list of things that has improved the world. And while I know there can be downsides to the telephone, the upsides of this technology really outweigh the bad. And don't forget ~ The beauty of the cellphone means you can block those annoying telemarketers

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