Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a
Speaker 1: love of all things tech. And we are continuing our
Speaker 1: look back in the classic episode archive with the A
Speaker 1: T and T Story. Now, last week we published or
Speaker 1: republished the A T and T Story Part one. This week,
Speaker 1: surprise surprise, it's the A T and T Story Part two.
Speaker 1: Originally this published on November six, two thousand thirteen. Let's
Speaker 1: listen in. How about an episode on the history of
Speaker 1: A T and T, especially the deregulation of the telco industry. Now,
Speaker 1: of course we already talked about the founding of A
Speaker 1: T and T, but and how it started off kind
Speaker 1: of as a natural monopoly. Um, now we're going to
Speaker 1: really look into how that continued and how the United
Speaker 1: States government began to uh put the brakes on A
Speaker 1: T and T a little bit, all right, because at
Speaker 1: the beginning they had kind of been saying, you know,
Speaker 1: you guys have this terrific infrastructure, you go on and
Speaker 1: build that. That's terrific, right, This would be incredibly useful
Speaker 1: for the United States and so and then, and they
Speaker 1: took it over just for example, during World War One,
Speaker 1: which we talked about in the first episode, government said
Speaker 1: let's just take over this for a little bit, and
Speaker 1: then returned it barely used just a couple of years later.
Speaker 1: So we left off in the twenties. So we're picking
Speaker 1: up right around nineteen twenty four, which is when A
Speaker 1: T and T developed something that frankly, I was shocked
Speaker 1: at how early the development for this technology came. I
Speaker 1: didn't expect to see this. It's a telephotography, which is
Speaker 1: also called a fax machine in goods. Yeah, I had
Speaker 1: no idea. Yeah, people were faxing goofy little pictures of
Speaker 1: of early twentieth century folklore back and forth, you know,
Speaker 1: letting people know that if you if you forward this
Speaker 1: one letter, Rockefeller will give you free M and m's
Speaker 1: or something. I don't I I don't think that's what
Speaker 1: was actually being facts at the time. I honestly, UH
Speaker 1: just made all that up because it didn't research that.
Speaker 1: But then I don't know what the first facts was,
Speaker 1: hopefully not not some sort of email scam. We should
Speaker 1: do we should do another. I think we actually got
Speaker 1: a request for a facts related episode we should totally
Speaker 1: look into that. Sometimes we should do one about facts
Speaker 1: machines and one on facts lore, which is kind of
Speaker 1: the predecessor to the Internet email memes that we see
Speaker 1: today or Facebook games exactly. Okay, So things that we
Speaker 1: do know about Bell Telephone Laboratories Incorporated open for business,
Speaker 1: that is, that is Bell's R and D Lab, which
Speaker 1: would come out with some of the most important pieces
Speaker 1: of technology of the twentieth century. Exactly. Yes, Bell Labs
Speaker 1: famous for their research. And here's the thing is that
Speaker 1: the research that Bell Labs did was not always directly
Speaker 1: related to the telephone industry, at least not in a
Speaker 1: way that you could tell from the surface. But but
Speaker 1: down the line would become critical. Exactly. It's it's instrument
Speaker 1: at all in the way telephones work today. Now. Nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty six, that's when Bell Labs and Western Electric begin
Speaker 1: to make sound equipment for these crazy moving pictures that
Speaker 1: are coming out of the Hollywood these days. That's crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so obviously not too far from the whole idea of
Speaker 1: transmitting sound. Now it's recording and playing back sound in
Speaker 1: a way that works in a synchronized fashion with moving pictures.
Speaker 1: Nineteen seven A T and T begins trans atlantic telephone
Speaker 1: service between London and the United States. But they don't
Speaker 1: have a cable. There's no cable connecting the US in
Speaker 1: London at this point. That would be via a radio signal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, it was, you know, it was. It was
Speaker 1: a slight a little expensive to make a phone call.
Speaker 1: It was seventy five bucks for three minutes. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: if you're looking at nineteen twenty seven dollars and then
Speaker 1: you compare them to today's dollars. I I used the
Speaker 1: Bureau of Labor Statistics, which uses the Consumer Price Index
Speaker 1: two factor in how much stuff costs from one era
Speaker 1: to another. According to that, that would be about a
Speaker 1: thousand and eight dollars for those three minutes. So if
Speaker 1: you've got an extremely important phone call right to your
Speaker 1: British buddy, or if you're in London your Yankee friend, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty much. That's that's pretty expensive. UM ninety nine,
Speaker 1: Bell Labs broadcast the first public demonstration of a color
Speaker 1: television picture. That's early too. Yeah, and it was. The
Speaker 1: thing they showed was a telephone operator, of course, dressed
Speaker 1: in a colorful costume. And uh, A T and T
Speaker 1: researchers that year filed a patent for coaxial cable for
Speaker 1: broadband transmission. As of that year, there are more than
Speaker 1: twenty million phones in the United States, and fifteen point
Speaker 1: four million of those are operated by Bell. UH and
Speaker 1: they've got how many four hundred and fifty thousand employees
Speaker 1: They started off with one Thomas Watson. UH. Now they're
Speaker 1: up to four hundred and fifty thousand. Of course Watson
Speaker 1: was no longer with a company at that point, but
Speaker 1: at any rate, Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And so nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty Bill starts to hold demonstrations to teach customers how
Speaker 1: to use dial service, the rotary dial, right, because before that,
Speaker 1: whenever you picked up a phone, you would reach an
Speaker 1: operator and you tell the operator where you wanted to
Speaker 1: place your call. They would find out how to root
Speaker 1: it and do it for you. And UH, I think
Speaker 1: in the nine twenties they were starting to get into
Speaker 1: some electro mechanical systems that would do that for you
Speaker 1: but or for the operators, but you still had to
Speaker 1: talk to an operator to get your call to where
Speaker 1: it was going. This was the first time that you
Speaker 1: would use a number a data set to tell the
Speaker 1: phone what you wanted to do, right, So this is
Speaker 1: where people started to get phone numbers and you would
Speaker 1: start to dial numbers and uh and all the all
Speaker 1: the switching was handled by electro mechanical switches at that
Speaker 1: point forward. But you had to teach people how to
Speaker 1: do this because it was new. No one had ever
Speaker 1: had to do it before. And I don't know how
Speaker 1: many of our listeners are familiar with the old rotary
Speaker 1: dial phones. Dialing on those could be really fun if
Speaker 1: you were a kid, but if you were an adult
Speaker 1: making the Earth fifth or six phone call that day,
Speaker 1: you just sit there and hope that none of the
Speaker 1: numbers you had to call were in that nine range. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where you know, you dial and you just the whole
Speaker 1: thing click click ci ci cick click cick cick click.
Speaker 1: Good times. So by nineteen thirty two, Bell had was
Speaker 1: in control of seventy nine percent of national telecommunications market
Speaker 1: in the United States. They had made acquisitions throughout those
Speaker 1: years and had bought up smaller companies, so nearly of
Speaker 1: all telecommunications in the US falls under that's an effectively
Speaker 1: a monopoly, Oh sure, right right, And it's also up
Speaker 1: from what's that about only a few years ago. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so they were, they were continuing to grow, and they
Speaker 1: were already practically the only game in town. So and
Speaker 1: a monopoly doesn't have to really be the only business, right.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be just the only one out
Speaker 1: there offering something. To have a monopoly, you just have
Speaker 1: to be so large that no one can realistically compete
Speaker 1: with you on any similar level. So let's say, for example,
Speaker 1: that Google were to to completely dominate search. They're they're
Speaker 1: pretty far in the lead. Let's say they completely dominated
Speaker 1: to the point where no other search engine is even close.
Speaker 1: Then Google would have to start worrying about being identified
Speaker 1: as a monopoly. And this is the funny thing is
Speaker 1: this doesn't necessarily mean that people are practicing unfair you know, tactics.
Speaker 1: That just may mean that the way they do business
Speaker 1: was the way that resonated with a lot of people.
Speaker 1: So you can have different views of monopolies. You can
Speaker 1: either see people trying their best to try and grab
Speaker 1: up as much as the pie as possible, or you
Speaker 1: just see people just doing a really good job and
Speaker 1: then being punished for it. So there are two sides
Speaker 1: to this coin. I think in this case, in particular,
Speaker 1: it was due to that entire government regulation of basically
Speaker 1: allowing them to be a monopoly could be. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: had a huge head start, and then the government gave
Speaker 1: them an even bigger boost. Well, first of all, because
Speaker 1: of that whole patent thing we talked about in the
Speaker 1: last episode, they had exclusive rights for the longest time,
Speaker 1: so yeah, they definitely benefited quite a bit. Moving on, so,
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty four, A t T began trans Pacific telephone
Speaker 1: service between the United States and Japan via radio signals.
Speaker 1: So again, as with many of these beginning services, you
Speaker 1: could only put through a single call at a time,
Speaker 1: right and now granted they had they had improved the
Speaker 1: efficiency of radio by that time. So remember just a
Speaker 1: few years earlier, that transatlantic call was around seventy five
Speaker 1: bucks for three minutes. They lowered the costs for Pacific calls,
Speaker 1: which is amazing. It was only thirty nine bucks for
Speaker 1: three minutes, yep, which in today's money would be about
Speaker 1: six hundred and didn't yeah you know, forget your friends
Speaker 1: in London, call your buddies over in Tokyo. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: still expensive, but not nearly as much as it was before.
Speaker 1: Now this brings us up. Ninety four is big year
Speaker 1: for a T and T because that's also when the
Speaker 1: United States government passed the Communications Act of nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 1: They thought about passing the Communications Act of nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: four nineteen thirty three, but the name just didn't work,
Speaker 1: so they held off for a full year. Lawrence just
Speaker 1: staring at me. She doesn't like it when I throw
Speaker 1: in jokes, so especially bad ones established that that that's
Speaker 1: the act that actually established the Federal Communications Commission, also
Speaker 1: known as the f c C. Now the FCC did
Speaker 1: not just spring out fully formed and have brand new powers.
Speaker 1: It actually kind of absorbed some previously existing organizations like
Speaker 1: the Federal Radio Commission and parts not all of it,
Speaker 1: but parts of the Interstate Commerce Commission that governed telephone
Speaker 1: and telegraph operations and kind of centralized all this because
Speaker 1: this was one of those examples of how technology outpaces
Speaker 1: is legislation absolutely, and so this was the United States
Speaker 1: government attempt to try and catch up to the state
Speaker 1: of affairs because they said, well, you know, back when
Speaker 1: this was starting, we had no idea where it was
Speaker 1: going to go, and now we need to be big
Speaker 1: enough thing. And especially considering that more and more people
Speaker 1: were using radio signals. In the way that radio signals
Speaker 1: work is that you cannot have two signals on the
Speaker 1: same bandwidth going out near each other because they'll conflict.
Speaker 1: You end up getting interference. Interference, right, So so yeah,
Speaker 1: so so government regulations starting to crack down on how
Speaker 1: people could use these new fancy radio signals in order
Speaker 1: to keep the airways clear for everyone's use, right. And
Speaker 1: it also gave the FCC authority to regulate rates of
Speaker 1: interstate and international common carriers and administration relating to electronic communication,
Speaker 1: which was basically saying don't gouge your customers, right. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, A T and T remember was pretty
Speaker 1: much exclusive as far as long distance goes. So any
Speaker 1: regional operator had to pay a toll in order for
Speaker 1: their customers to be able to access law distance. So
Speaker 1: if you're if let's say Lauren, You're in Atlanta and
Speaker 1: you want to call me, and for some reason, I'm
Speaker 1: in Omaha, Nebraska, and there are two different regional carriers,
Speaker 1: and so you are using your regional carrier to tie
Speaker 1: into the A T and T long distance service, and
Speaker 1: then that call goes to me, Well, your regional service
Speaker 1: has to pay a fee in order to access that
Speaker 1: a T N T long distance, and then that fee
Speaker 1: usually gets passed down to you, the customer. And this
Speaker 1: was a way of preventing any company, specifically A T
Speaker 1: and T, because they were really the only one who
Speaker 1: could have that kind of wheeld that kind of power
Speaker 1: right from raising prices so much that it puts other
Speaker 1: companies out of business or it puts undue harm on
Speaker 1: the consumer. That was the intent. Uh. That brings us
Speaker 1: up to nine. When A T and T completed the
Speaker 1: first around the world call. It went all the way
Speaker 1: around the world. That seems uh, less than useful in
Speaker 1: a technical sense, but good to know that they could
Speaker 1: do it. It was an impressive display of technology, not practical.
Speaker 1: If I want to if I want to call you,
Speaker 1: I just stand up and shout over the divider between
Speaker 1: our desks. I don't, I don't. No, I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't not anymore, not on not on Tuesdays anyway. Not
Speaker 1: after hr taught to me ninety seven, that's when Clinton
Speaker 1: Davison of Bell Telephone Labs wins the Nobel Prize in
Speaker 1: Physics for experimental confirmation of the wave nature of electrons.
Speaker 1: So this is the first Nobel Prize awarded to someone
Speaker 1: working out of Bell Labs. It would not be the last.
Speaker 1: And uh, in case you're wondering the whole wave nature
Speaker 1: of electrons, well, electrons are particles, but in the lab
Speaker 1: we have, I say, we scientists have observed that electrons
Speaker 1: could also behave like waves. And so this was that
Speaker 1: whole wave particle duality thing you can hear about in
Speaker 1: various types of particle physics, quantum mechanics, that kind thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: we won't go into it here because it's outside the
Speaker 1: realm of this podcast, but fascinating stuff. So it's no
Speaker 1: no surprise they got the Nobel Prize. Now nineteen nine,
Speaker 1: the telephone is deployed as quote a weapon of preparedness
Speaker 1: end quote. That's also when Western Electric makes signal core
Speaker 1: sets leading up to the US involvement in World War Two.
Speaker 1: So signal core sets are essentially kind of like radio telephones.
Speaker 1: It is something that certain h certain units in World
Speaker 1: War Two had access to in order to maintain communications.
Speaker 1: And UH just showed that this company was still very
Speaker 1: much involved in government uh projects, which will become important
Speaker 1: in just a minute. But before we get to that,
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Speaker 1: I gotta talk about Community. Community is one of those
Speaker 1: shows where when I watched the first couple of episodes,
Speaker 1: it didn't quite grab me. But as I again to
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Speaker 1: way that jokes would play out, not just over an episode,
Speaker 1: but over several episodes, I couldn't help but feel that
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Speaker 1: you pretty much have to go check out Community. And
Speaker 1: we're back, all right. So now we're up to nineteen
Speaker 1: forty one. And we talked earlier about how Bell Labs
Speaker 1: was was pioneering coaxial cable development in the laboratory is
Speaker 1: when they actually installed the first non experimental coaxial cable
Speaker 1: for Bell service between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Steven's Point, Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: So this is physical cable they're laying down for the
Speaker 1: transmission of signals as opposed to transmitting them over the air.
Speaker 1: UM and uh, and it was a success. Ended up
Speaker 1: being the basis for the cable industry, also for the
Speaker 1: early internet industry. Pretty impressive stuff. Now, this is when
Speaker 1: World War two is being waged around the world, mostly
Speaker 1: and of course the European and UH Southeast Asia theaters. Um.
Speaker 1: This is also a time when Bell employees would serve
Speaker 1: in World War two. UH and and Bell companies would
Speaker 1: wind up producing more than one thousand two D defense
Speaker 1: projects for all all kinds of stuff. I mean, you know, materials, radios, radar,
Speaker 1: mind fuses, all of that technical stuff that needed to happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that another government project that was a big part
Speaker 1: of what a T and T was doing at that
Speaker 1: point was when A T and T begins automation of
Speaker 1: long distance switching. So now there at this point. The
Speaker 1: rolling it out would take years, sure, but but it
Speaker 1: was just not only local service but also across different
Speaker 1: local UH networks. Right right, local operators connecting to the
Speaker 1: long distance one. We're starting to see the switching become automated. UH.
Speaker 1: That would be a big it. Proven inefficiency to as
Speaker 1: American households had a telephone, the problem was they all
Speaker 1: wanted to call the other half. Yeah, so darned when
Speaker 1: are they when are the Johnsons get that phone. We
Speaker 1: have more to say about the early days or middling
Speaker 1: days of a T and T, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. Was when A T and T offers
Speaker 1: mobile telephone service in St. Louis, Missouri, And it's not
Speaker 1: what you're thinking of, Well, I had a car, Yeah,
Speaker 1: these were These were not the kind of handheld devices
Speaker 1: that that even Zach Morris would have many decades later.
Speaker 1: That's saved by the bell reference. That's that's that's after
Speaker 1: my time. But I get it. Um. I think each
Speaker 1: region of service had a single antenna which could handle
Speaker 1: about twenty calls at once at most most and sometimes
Speaker 1: it was between twelve and twenty. It all depended upon
Speaker 1: the antenna. Yeah. These were again using radio signals, sort
Speaker 1: of like those those transatlantic and trans Pacific connections that
Speaker 1: we talked about earlier, but on a more mobile scale.
Speaker 1: You would call in and it would it would communicate
Speaker 1: to it to his tower, kind of similar to cell service,
Speaker 1: but it's not cell service. Yeah, if you if you
Speaker 1: moved outside the range of that antenna, you would not
Speaker 1: be able to place that call because there were there
Speaker 1: weren't cells. You know, we will have to do a
Speaker 1: full episode on how cell phones work at some point
Speaker 1: to explain that handoff process. But there was no handoff process,
Speaker 1: so if you moved out of range, that was it.
Speaker 1: And these mobile telephones were enormous and heavy. They were
Speaker 1: more akin to the sort of stuff you would have
Speaker 1: seen in like if you've ever watched the World War
Speaker 1: two movie where they have one of those backpack radios. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think Patent carries a few around sometimes
Speaker 1: it's a it's a little closer to that, not quite
Speaker 1: as military looking, but similar in size and weight. So
Speaker 1: not something that was terribly useful for the average person,
Speaker 1: but for some people like truck drivers it might come
Speaker 1: in handy or other other people who happened to be
Speaker 1: very mobile but have a large carrying capacity. On the
Speaker 1: middle of times, um, so the this is also the
Speaker 1: year seven when Bell Labs employees invent a particular piece
Speaker 1: of technology that would go on to play a very
Speaker 1: important role I think, and not only telephone industry, but
Speaker 1: computers the future as we know it. But we're talking
Speaker 1: about the transistor. Yep, that it was Bell Labs that
Speaker 1: came up with the transistor. And we've talked about and
Speaker 1: then we talked about these gentlemen before. There were three
Speaker 1: people in particular leading that project who ended up later
Speaker 1: on winning a Nobel Prize for that invention. That's John Bardine,
Speaker 1: Walter Brittaine, and then William Shockley, who we talked about
Speaker 1: recently when we were talking about another company. Shockley's shocking
Speaker 1: views that led the some people to to become the
Speaker 1: traitor usk or something like that. Yeah, yeah, and and
Speaker 1: and this transistor. We talked in the previous episode about
Speaker 1: vacuum tubes being such a huge development in the telecommunications
Speaker 1: industry because they allowed for those first electro mechanical computers
Speaker 1: to to work. And the transistor was what would replace
Speaker 1: these vacuum tubes in anything that was doing computing work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would allow you to do amplification, it would allow
Speaker 1: you to do and miniaturization. Maniaturization was the big thing.
Speaker 1: It reduced heat and it allowed for miniaturization, something that
Speaker 1: you couldn't do with vacuum tubes, which meant that our
Speaker 1: computers no longer would take up the space of a building,
Speaker 1: could eventually take up the space of you know, your
Speaker 1: pocket smartphones. All of this really makes me wonder what
Speaker 1: would have happened. If A T and T had not
Speaker 1: had the reach and power and the money to have
Speaker 1: this research and development lab. You know, if if they
Speaker 1: had not been the crazy not quite monopoly sort of
Speaker 1: a monopoly that they were, you know, would you know
Speaker 1: parallel development was going on in some other last Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we would have eventually seen the transistor, but
Speaker 1: it probably would have come out later, and it probably
Speaker 1: would have taken longer to get ramped up into a
Speaker 1: a form that would be manufacturable, because this early transistor
Speaker 1: was not something you would put in any kind of electronics.
Speaker 1: It was more of a proof of concept. If you've
Speaker 1: ever seen a replica of it, it was enormous. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's one transistor. Keep in mind that your average microprocessor
Speaker 1: could have a billion or more transistors on it. This
Speaker 1: thing was big enough to fit like it was, it
Speaker 1: would fit in the palm of your hand. But the wood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so this is this is early days yet, so
Speaker 1: I think our world would be significantly different had that
Speaker 1: not happened. So let's move on to Uh. That was
Speaker 1: when A T. T began offering networking services for TV. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the Northeast and the Midwest, So you know, The
Speaker 1: way it would work is that your your networks, your
Speaker 1: big networks, would use this service to transmit programming to
Speaker 1: affiliated stations in different regions of the states. So that
Speaker 1: way you could have like the Big Network broadcast out
Speaker 1: of some place like New York and then have that
Speaker 1: sent to to an affiliate station that might be far
Speaker 1: across the country. This was also the year that A
Speaker 1: ten T began to build its first microwave relay system
Speaker 1: between New York and Boston. And microwave relay is a
Speaker 1: an improvement on, or not an improvement, but but a
Speaker 1: parallel development on that radio transmission that we've been talking about.
Speaker 1: It's um it's a series of antennas or dishes that
Speaker 1: carry data via microwave, and these can be sent to
Speaker 1: narrow beams directly to the receiving devices, which means that
Speaker 1: you can have multiple devices working within the same bandwidth
Speaker 1: at the same time. So you dramatically increased capacity that way,
Speaker 1: right right, UM. You know, they've also got a higher
Speaker 1: bandwidth and other radio waves. But you do have to
Speaker 1: have a direct line of sight, which means that you
Speaker 1: know it's it's you can't have something behind a hill
Speaker 1: or behind a tree. Or behind a house. It's not
Speaker 1: gonna work. Yeah, So there were limitations, but still dramatic
Speaker 1: improvements in being able to transmit information and both data
Speaker 1: and voices it would turn out. Uh So, moving on,
Speaker 1: we now get hit in nine with another antitrust suit.
Speaker 1: We don't actually this would not be resolved for several years,
Speaker 1: and believe us, we will tell you about it when
Speaker 1: that happens. In that timeline. At that time, A T
Speaker 1: and T controlled about eight percent of the telecommunications industry
Speaker 1: in the United States, so still holding steady from several
Speaker 1: years before when they were at seventy. But keep in
Speaker 1: mind the industry is growing by leaps and bounds like
Speaker 1: that that of American households with telephones is growing over
Speaker 1: a time. So while A T and t s percentage
Speaker 1: might have gone from the actual numbers are huge all right, Right.
Speaker 1: As of seventy sevent of American households would have a telephone.
Speaker 1: So that's that's the range that it was growing a
Speaker 1: huge jump. Yeah, and back in nine, that's also when
Speaker 1: A T and T introduced the five series tele phone,
Speaker 1: which was one of the most recognizable phones ever introduced.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen this? It's essentially the base station
Speaker 1: with the rotary dial on it, and then you have
Speaker 1: the back of it. The top back has the cradle
Speaker 1: where the handset sits. And uh, it's just one of
Speaker 1: those phones that once you see it, you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what even if only phone I've ever seen as
Speaker 1: a smartphone, somehow I recognize that that's a phone. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: because phones don't like that or sound like that anymore.
Speaker 1: And yet it's still the enduring image, I would say.
Speaker 1: And that's probably the where the sound that we think
Speaker 1: of as a telephone ring comes from. As well. You know,
Speaker 1: before we all had you know whatever Miley Cyrus ring
Speaker 1: tones are, etcetera. Hey, let's not reveal to the listeners
Speaker 1: what my ringtone is. But we talked about that one
Speaker 1: A T and T introduces customer dialing of domestic long
Speaker 1: distance calls, and it started in Inglewood, New Jersey. So
Speaker 1: before that time, you could make local calls dialing. We
Speaker 1: talked about that earlier, but you would still connect with
Speaker 1: an operator to make a long distance call. Also that year,
Speaker 1: A T and T helped broadcast a live transcontinental television show.
Speaker 1: Actually it was an address that President Harry Truman made
Speaker 1: to the Japan Peace Treaty Conference at the United Nations.
Speaker 1: So big, big development in in just television broadcast at
Speaker 1: that point, right, This was thanks to that to that
Speaker 1: microwave really network that I was talking about that they
Speaker 1: had spent the past few years building um As of
Speaker 1: ninety one, it was a system of a hundred and
Speaker 1: seven towers, some thirty miles apart each and this telecast
Speaker 1: happened only a month after the very first call was
Speaker 1: placed via this microwave network. They moved up their telecast
Speaker 1: schedule by almost a month in order to accommodate President Truman.
Speaker 1: That's pretty incredible that they were able to accommodate that
Speaker 1: so quickly, considering that it was just recently new technology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty amazing. Nine. For the first time, Western Electric
Speaker 1: begins to produce telephones in different colors, giving choices to consumers.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't just black telephones anymore. Now you can
Speaker 1: get them in beige. Uh. Nine fifty six was the
Speaker 1: resolution of that anti trust lawsuit. Yeah, so this was
Speaker 1: a big deal. So part of the antitrust lawsuit mad
Speaker 1: that A T and T agreed to restrict itself to
Speaker 1: just dealing with the telephone industry and also occasionally doing
Speaker 1: any sort of projects for the federal government that was
Speaker 1: asked of it, but otherwise to stay out of other
Speaker 1: industries television, of the slowly burgeoning computer industry that was
Speaker 1: going on at the time. So essentially they were they
Speaker 1: were saying, all right, you know, we we don't want
Speaker 1: any trouble, Mr. United States Government, we will back off.
Speaker 1: So this is the first of that of that telco
Speaker 1: industry regulation. But we'll get into a one that directly
Speaker 1: affected A T and T even more than this did
Speaker 1: another couple of decades, but see an even bigger one. Um.
Speaker 1: This particular consent decree also included a stipulation that had
Speaker 1: to place its patents for the transistor which which our friends,
Speaker 1: uh the nice Studeley, Dudes, Bardine and Britain, et cetera,
Speaker 1: and Shockley yes, uh, they won the Nobel Prize for
Speaker 1: it this year. Um, they had to place the patents
Speaker 1: for that transistor in the public domain and be willing
Speaker 1: to license their tech for about dollars, which according to
Speaker 1: that Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator, would be about two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. Right, And when you think
Speaker 1: about the benefit of transistors. It's it's fortunate that that happened,
Speaker 1: absolutely because imagine a world where a T and T
Speaker 1: had had held onto that for yeah, I had what
Speaker 1: if they had had exclusive rights to the transistor the
Speaker 1: way they had exclusive rights to the telephone company. Certainly,
Speaker 1: everything that we talked about in our in our last
Speaker 1: in our in our last few podcasts where we've talked
Speaker 1: about companies that were like fair Child Semiconductor and also
Speaker 1: things like Texas Instruments and other companies that that did
Speaker 1: pioneering work with transistors, Obviously that would not have been
Speaker 1: the case had they not been allowed to license that technology.
Speaker 1: So yeah, big big decision there also was when service
Speaker 1: opened up for the TAT one, which was the Transatlantic
Speaker 1: UH telephone cable. Now, this is a cable that actually
Speaker 1: did stretch all the way from the United States to Europe,
Speaker 1: and the initial capacity was for thirty six calls at
Speaker 1: a time, so much better than that one call at
Speaker 1: a time radio method they had been using decades before.
Speaker 1: And they were also of a higher quality the calls
Speaker 1: that you could place than via radio. And the cost
Speaker 1: was a near twelve dollars for the first three minutes,
Speaker 1: which translates to about a hundred and three bucks today,
Speaker 1: So a hundred three dollar phone call for three minutes,
Speaker 1: and we're also slightly more secure. There is less chance
Speaker 1: of somebody else. Yeah, it's a lot harder to tap
Speaker 1: into a phone line when it's underwater, not that I
Speaker 1: speak from experience. Was also the year that the first
Speaker 1: picture phone system was tested. And and by picture phone,
Speaker 1: I mean this is this isn't FaceTime, it's you know,
Speaker 1: it would send an image about once every two seconds.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna get a little bit more into picture
Speaker 1: phone shenanigans. In the following years, Yeah, T and T
Speaker 1: introduced the first commercial modem, which was meant for enterprise customers,
Speaker 1: not not average consumers. So it allowed for computers to
Speaker 1: make a direct connection to one another. There's not such
Speaker 1: a thing as as a network yet that that would
Speaker 1: come into play once arpa net really would give her
Speaker 1: would rise up in a couple of years. But modems,
Speaker 1: of course, became very important for that kind of technology
Speaker 1: to exist. A. T. And also began research work in
Speaker 1: lasers and fiber optics. That again another transformative technology in telecommunications.
Speaker 1: Speaking of transformative technologies, I believe you have a really
Speaker 1: important note. I included this one just for Lauren because
Speaker 1: Lauren's a girl. You know, girls like pink. So I
Speaker 1: know that because the technology industries have taught me numerous
Speaker 1: times by all the pink electronics that are out there,
Speaker 1: that pink is for girls, and girls like pink, and
Speaker 1: if you don't like pink, then something's wrong, right right? Absolutely? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, obviously I don't really believe any of that,
Speaker 1: but the introduction of the Pink Princess phone game in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine, and then I have a note here
Speaker 1: which says, don't hit me, Lauren, Lauren, please don't hit me.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're gonna take a quick break to thank
Speaker 1: our sponsor while Lauren calms down. Alright, we're back. Lauren,
Speaker 1: has your murderous rage kind of died down to just
Speaker 1: just a loathing. No, yeah, I guess. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's just normal, normal levels at okay um no,
Speaker 1: so okay. So coming back to the timeline, in nineteen
Speaker 1: launched Echo, which was a balloon off which data could
Speaker 1: be bounced. And this is about to become important because
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty two they would launch Telestar one, which
Speaker 1: was the very first active communications satellite. Right. Remember that
Speaker 1: at this time, the satellites that have been launched into
Speaker 1: orbit would usually transmit a very weak, very simple signal
Speaker 1: just to alert people on the ground that in fact
Speaker 1: it existed, right. It was just a ping really. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So like spot Nick, it was the machine that went
Speaker 1: ping and went around the world a few times, and
Speaker 1: people on the ground could detect it, but you couldn't
Speaker 1: communicate with it. You couldn't use it to bounce signals
Speaker 1: off of it. It was really just there as a
Speaker 1: proof of concept, right. So the Tellstar one allowed for
Speaker 1: actual live transmission of television across the Atlantic. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: and the first phone call transferred through space was between
Speaker 1: the A. T and T chairman and the Vice President
Speaker 1: of the United States within thirty minutes. That also tested
Speaker 1: live and taped television and other data. Though the whole
Speaker 1: project was a collaboration with NASA actually, but it was
Speaker 1: the first privately sponsored space launch. Yeah. And now look
Speaker 1: at our world. Private private sponsored space launches are are
Speaker 1: becoming the way that we're getting into space these days.
Speaker 1: Nineteen three, A T and T introduces touch tone service,
Speaker 1: so we start to see the rotary dial begin to disappear,
Speaker 1: and now we have the keypad, the familiar keypad. If
Speaker 1: you've ever used an old phone with a keypad on it.
Speaker 1: Some of you guys just don't even know what that is.
Speaker 1: You to all your all your buttons have appeared on
Speaker 1: a screen. It's it's what the buttons replicate on a screen.
Speaker 1: Skew morphism. Yeah, I want to skew more. Fig dial
Speaker 1: pad where it's the rotary top pad. I'm sure there
Speaker 1: has to be one positive something for me to look
Speaker 1: at more. Now, one of you clever app makers out
Speaker 1: there do that the rotary dial dial face. Uh, I
Speaker 1: don't know why I would give myself. I would just
Speaker 1: be less likely to make phone calls, which I guess
Speaker 1: is a good thing in the wrong run. I no
Speaker 1: one wants to hear from me anyway. I'm alright. A
Speaker 1: t T opens t PC one, which was the first
Speaker 1: submarine telephone cable across the Pacific. So this stretched from
Speaker 1: Japan to Hawaii and they're connected to two cables that
Speaker 1: linked Hawaii with the mainland. Um so experimental picture phone
Speaker 1: service also begins in some cities. It talked about that right.
Speaker 1: It was installed specifically in exhibits at Disneyland and at
Speaker 1: the New York World's Fair. Yeah, so again I had
Speaker 1: a monor and UH and a camera and was very primitive,
Speaker 1: but it was sort of the the predecessor to what
Speaker 1: we would think of as video calls, which still we're
Speaker 1: waiting to take off. N A T and T installs
Speaker 1: a special purpose computer which was the first electronic telephone
Speaker 1: switch in a local telephone exchange in New Jersey, and
Speaker 1: I believe that first which was the four E S S,
Speaker 1: which could handle about five hundred thousand calls per hour,
Speaker 1: which was ten times the amount of the standard electro
Speaker 1: mechanical switch could handle exactly. So now we're moving into
Speaker 1: the digital age and beyond the electro mechanical age. Nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, A T and T introduces nine one one
Speaker 1: as the US nationwide emergency number, first rolled out in
Speaker 1: Huntington's Indiana. Other countries have their own emergency numbers, and uh,
Speaker 1: I have to mention, you know, according to the crowd,
Speaker 1: apparently the UK just changed it to oh one eight
Speaker 1: nine nine eight one nine to five three. I had
Speaker 1: to put that in there. Yeah, No, incredibly important. UM.
Speaker 1: As of nineteen sixty of American households had a phone line. Finally, slackers,
Speaker 1: They just didn't have anyone they wanted to talk to.
Speaker 1: Nineteen seventy A T and T introduces customer dialing for
Speaker 1: international long distance telephone calls, starting with Manhattan and London.
Speaker 1: Um Also that year, a commercial picture phone service debut
Speaker 1: in downtown Pittsburgh and and went absolutely nowhere. Basically nobody
Speaker 1: cared at all. I think they were like, this is
Speaker 1: cumbersome and kind of stupid, and I don't want it.
Speaker 1: I think for a lot of us, video calls are
Speaker 1: still kind of slow to be adopted because it means
Speaker 1: having to keep some part of your house pristine so
Speaker 1: that the people who are calling you don't realize how
Speaker 1: you really live. Always really nervous about about web web
Speaker 1: chat calls at work because I'm like, oh crap, what's
Speaker 1: going on in the background. Is Josh doing something inappropriate
Speaker 1: back there? You know? Buty, Like by inappropriate, I mean
Speaker 1: like using the swords that Chuck has to have a
Speaker 1: fight with someone else in the editorial department, not that
Speaker 1: he would ever do that again. Labs produced the Unix
Speaker 1: operating system. Yeah, huge development here. So the idea was
Speaker 1: to create an operating system that was platform independent, meaning
Speaker 1: that you could put this operating system on different types
Speaker 1: of computers. Because keep in mind, in the early days,
Speaker 1: a lot of these computers had proprietary systems that they
Speaker 1: would operate on, and that was it. You could not
Speaker 1: have You couldn't run the same kind of software for
Speaker 1: one computer and a next Yeah, because exactly because they did,
Speaker 1: they weren't compatible. You had to recompile all of your
Speaker 1: programming into a different language so you would run on
Speaker 1: a different computer. This was kind of an attempt to
Speaker 1: allow a T and T to have a computer system
Speaker 1: where it didn't really matter what hardware they had as
Speaker 1: long as it could run this upbring system. They could
Speaker 1: run the same software across the multiple divisions. Huge development
Speaker 1: absolutely um in nineteen seventy five, armed partially with this
Speaker 1: at begin to computerize its operations. Yeah. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: computers could handle a much larger call volume. Like you
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, Lauren, that that one switch was a good example.
Speaker 1: So we're starting to see a rapid rollout of development,
Speaker 1: although it would take probably ten years for this to
Speaker 1: be uh to be complete, because you know, it's a
Speaker 1: huge infrastructure, right, I mean, you're talking about a nationwide
Speaker 1: telephone service. So it's not like you just flip a
Speaker 1: switch and suddenly everything's magically in computer world, right right, Um,
Speaker 1: the in fact, it would take until to complete the transition.
Speaker 1: That's true. The very last toll switch was completed in
Speaker 1: nine so even longer than I said ten years, I
Speaker 1: was way off. N that's when m c I filed
Speaker 1: an antitrust suit against A T and T. Now they
Speaker 1: had started looking at the possibility of pursuing this kind
Speaker 1: of uh legal action back in there, you know, a
Speaker 1: little earlier in the seventies, they had met with the
Speaker 1: Department of Justice, but a T and T ended up
Speaker 1: disconnecting m c i s foreign exchange customers, kind of
Speaker 1: It doesn't say directly in response to m c I
Speaker 1: asking the d o J about this, but you might
Speaker 1: be able to draw that conclusion. So with this antitrust
Speaker 1: lawsuit filed against A T and T, the Department of
Speaker 1: Justice would then look into the matter and file its
Speaker 1: own antitrust lawsuit against A T and T in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven, So that will come into play in just
Speaker 1: a couple of years. Where that's that's the big one
Speaker 1: we talk about, the big This this lawsuit would go
Speaker 1: on for six years. Yeah. So in seventy seven, besides
Speaker 1: the fact that the d O J brought an anti
Speaker 1: trust lawsuit against it, A T. And He also opened
Speaker 1: the first network operations center in New Jersey. Now, this
Speaker 1: allowed A T and T to have a centralized location
Speaker 1: where they can have real time management of its entire
Speaker 1: long distance network. Instead of having a bunch of regional
Speaker 1: offices that all coordinate together, they could actually control everything
Speaker 1: from one spot, like you know, the Empire. That same year,
Speaker 1: A T and T installed the first fiber optic cable
Speaker 1: in a commercial communication system, so using light as opposed
Speaker 1: to electricity through a copper wire on the On his
Speaker 1: first day on the bench, Judge Harold Green drew the A. T.
Speaker 1: And T Anti trust case. Can you imagine that, your
Speaker 1: first day on the bench as a judge and you
Speaker 1: draw the A T and T Anti trust case. I
Speaker 1: think that must in fact be where jokes about like
Speaker 1: the cases of the Mondays come from. That's pretty ridiculous,
Speaker 1: a case of many years of Mondays for that poor
Speaker 1: judge n nine. All right, so in the United States
Speaker 1: they had about a hundred seventy five million, five thirty
Speaker 1: five thousand and telephones active, give or take a few,
Speaker 1: and Bell had more than a million employees. That's incredible.
Speaker 1: A million people working for this company. That's phenomenal. One
Speaker 1: m c I wins its antitrust lawsuit against A T
Speaker 1: and T and the United States versus A T and
Speaker 1: T goes to trial. So the m c I lawsuits over,
Speaker 1: but the Department of Justices lawsuits beginning about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that brings us to January two. We're gonna end
Speaker 1: on this year and we'll pick up in night three
Speaker 1: in our next podcast. But six years of this federal
Speaker 1: antitrust case going on in some form or another, A
Speaker 1: T and T is up against the wall. They have
Speaker 1: really very few options, so they agree to divest themselves
Speaker 1: of the seven regional Bell operating company carriers that they owned.
Speaker 1: So like the big ones, which also represented smaller companies
Speaker 1: inside it was up until this point um Jen really
Speaker 1: referred to as Mom Bell and yeah, all the different
Speaker 1: Bell systems, Southwestern Bell, Bell South, you know all these.
Speaker 1: If you've ever heard a company with Bell in the
Speaker 1: title of it as a telephone company, it belonged to
Speaker 1: this at the time. So A T. T essentially is
Speaker 1: getting rid of all of its local calling service. It's
Speaker 1: staying as a long distance carrier, and it also as
Speaker 1: a sort of a concession. I guess you could say,
Speaker 1: you know, it had to get rid of all this
Speaker 1: local stuff so that it could no longer kind of
Speaker 1: maintain this monopoly. But in return, it was allowed to
Speaker 1: go into computer systems. Yeah, so computer communication business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it lift this, lifted that that band we talked
Speaker 1: about from the nineteen fifty six judgment. So now while
Speaker 1: A T and T has to get rid of all
Speaker 1: those other companies, and it would take a couple of
Speaker 1: years for them to do this. I mean, obviously you
Speaker 1: can't just do this overnight either, but for them, the
Speaker 1: you know, in return, they get to go into this
Speaker 1: new industry. Um, so it's kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: uh so we lining kind of thing, if you want
Speaker 1: to look at it that way. And I think it
Speaker 1: would turn out, considering the very fast gains in Internet
Speaker 1: popularity over the next couple of decades, to be completely worthwhile, well,
Speaker 1: especially considering that that separation of A T and T
Speaker 1: and those bell operating companies wouldn't last for all of them.
Speaker 1: But that's a spoiler alert. Yeah, so A T and
Speaker 1: T would end up reabsorbing Western Electric, it would become
Speaker 1: part of a T and T formally it was no
Speaker 1: longer spun off. Also, the Bell operating companies would not
Speaker 1: be allowed to offer a long distance service, so A
Speaker 1: T T would remain the long distance carrier, the Bell
Speaker 1: operating companies would become local carriers, and neither was supposed
Speaker 1: to engage in the other's business. So uh, I mean,
Speaker 1: apart from a T T allowing the interconnections, but a
Speaker 1: T T could not go into local service. Bell operating
Speaker 1: companies cannot go into long distance service. Um. And also
Speaker 1: the Bell companies couldn't go into information service or manufacturing. Uh.
Speaker 1: And everyone was supposed to provide had equal access to
Speaker 1: all long distance companies. So in other words, you couldn't
Speaker 1: have Bell South say that A T T was the
Speaker 1: exclusive long distance carrier Bell South customers had to have choice.
Speaker 1: So that's was supposed to set, you know, put us
Speaker 1: all back at square one, reset the playing field, we're
Speaker 1: all on level ground. That was the intent. But I
Speaker 1: think we'll use our next episode to talk about how
Speaker 1: well that turned out. All right, I think it was
Speaker 1: really more, you know, it wasn't it wasn't leveling a
Speaker 1: playing field. It was giving luxury blimps to the people
Speaker 1: at the top of the playing field to kind of
Speaker 1: gently coast downwards a little bit, maybe a diamond encrusted
Speaker 1: uh landing pads for the golden parachutes. And that wraps
Speaker 1: up this classic episode. Next week we will conclude the
Speaker 1: three part which again we could easily extend into another part,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna listen to part three next week. If
Speaker 1: you guys have suggestions for future episodes that I should
Speaker 1: cover on current episodes of tech Stuff, let me know.
Speaker 1: The best way to get in touch with me is
Speaker 1: on Twitter. You can use the handle text stuff h
Speaker 1: s W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
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