Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text Stuff from how
Speaker 1: Stuff dot com. Eisn everyone, and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Stricklettenhand, I'm Lauren, and we're going to continue
Speaker 1: our discussion about a big old company and technology. And
Speaker 1: before we get into it, you know, I totally forgot
Speaker 1: to mention this in the last episode, that this is
Speaker 1: the episode where it really counts. We had a listener
Speaker 1: request this topic. Yeah, Earl request this topic on Twitter,
Speaker 1: And if you want to check out his tweets, it's
Speaker 1: E A R L E underscore c L U b B.
Speaker 1: That's where he sends out those those tweets on the
Speaker 1: Twitter thing. So his tweet was, how about an episode
Speaker 1: on the history of a T and T, especially the
Speaker 1: deregulation of the telco industry. Now, of course we already
Speaker 1: talked about the founding of a T and T, but
Speaker 1: and how it started off kind of as a natural monopoly. Um,
Speaker 1: now we're going to really look into how that continued
Speaker 1: and how the United States government began to put the
Speaker 1: brakes on a T and T a little bit, all right,
Speaker 1: because at the beginning they had kind of been saying,
Speaker 1: you know, you guys have this terrific infrastructure. You go
Speaker 1: on and build that. That's terrific, right, this would be
Speaker 1: incredibly useful for the United States and so and then
Speaker 1: and they took it over just for example, during World
Speaker 1: War One, which we talked about in the first episode,
Speaker 1: government said let's just take over this for a little bit,
Speaker 1: and then returned it barely used just a couple of
Speaker 1: years later. So we left off in the twenties. So
Speaker 1: we're picking up right around nineteen twenty four, which is
Speaker 1: when A. T and T developed something that frankly, I
Speaker 1: was shocked at how early the development for this technology came.
Speaker 1: I didn't expect to see this. It's a telephotography, which
Speaker 1: is also called a fax machine in NS. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: had no idea. 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 know. 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 I don't know what the first facts was hopefully
Speaker 1: not not some sort of email scam we should do
Speaker 1: we should do another. I think we actually got a
Speaker 1: request for a facts related episode. We should totally look
Speaker 1: into that. Sometimes we should do one about facts machines
Speaker 1: and one on facts lore, which is kind of the
Speaker 1: predecessor to the Internet email memes that we see today
Speaker 1: or Facebook games. Exactly. Okay, so things that we do
Speaker 1: know about Bell Telephone Laboratories Incorporated open for business. That is,
Speaker 1: that is Bell's R and D Lab, which would come
Speaker 1: out with some of the most important pieces of technology
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. Exactly. Yes, Bell Labs famous for
Speaker 1: their research. And here's the thing is that the research
Speaker 1: that Bell Labs did was not always directly related to
Speaker 1: the telephone industry, at least not way that you could
Speaker 1: tell from the surface, but but down the line would
Speaker 1: become critical. Exactly. It's uh, it's instrumental in the way
Speaker 1: telephones work today. Now, nineteen six that's when Bell Labs
Speaker 1: and Western Electric begin to make sound equipment for these
Speaker 1: crazy moving pictures that are coming out of the Hollywood
Speaker 1: these days. That's crazy. Yeah, so obviously not too far
Speaker 1: from the whole idea of transmitting sound. Now it's recording
Speaker 1: and playing back sound in a way that works in
Speaker 1: a synchronized fashion with moving pictures. Nineteen seven, A T
Speaker 1: and T begins trans atlantic telephone service between London and
Speaker 1: the United States. But they don't have a cable. There's
Speaker 1: no cable connecting the US in London at this point.
Speaker 1: That would be via a radio signal. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 1: it was, you know, it was. It was a slight
Speaker 1: a little expensive to make a phone call. I it
Speaker 1: was seventy five bucks for three minutes. Yeah, which if
Speaker 1: you're looking at nineteen seven dollars and then you compare
Speaker 1: them to today's dollars. I used the Beer Row of
Speaker 1: labor Statistics, which uses the Consumer Price Index two factor
Speaker 1: in how much stuff costs from one era to another.
Speaker 1: According to that, that would be about a thousand and
Speaker 1: eight dollars for those three minutes. So if you've got
Speaker 1: an extremely important phone call right to your British buddy,
Speaker 1: or if you're in London your Yankee friend, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: pretty much. That's that's pretty expensive. Um. Nineteen twenty 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, have four hundred and fifty thousand employees.
Speaker 1: They start it off with one Thomas Watson. UH. Now
Speaker 1: they're up to four d and fifty thousand. Of course
Speaker 1: Watson was no longer with the company at that point,
Speaker 1: but at any rate, Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And so
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty Bell starts to hold demonstrations to teach customers
Speaker 1: how to use dial service, the rotary dial, right, because
Speaker 1: before that, whenever you picked up a phone, you would
Speaker 1: reach an operator and you would tell the operator where
Speaker 1: you wanted to place your call. They would find out
Speaker 1: how to root it and do it for you. And UH,
Speaker 1: I think in the nine twenties they were starting to
Speaker 1: get into some electro mechanical systems that would do that
Speaker 1: for you but or for the operators, but you still
Speaker 1: had to talk to an operator to get your call
Speaker 1: to where it was going. This was the first time
Speaker 1: that you would use a number, a data set to
Speaker 1: tell the phone what you wanted to do. Right, So
Speaker 1: this is where people started to get phone numbers and
Speaker 1: you would start to dial numbers and uh and all
Speaker 1: the all the switching was handled by electro mechanical switches
Speaker 1: at that point forward. But you had to teach people
Speaker 1: how to do this because it was new. No one
Speaker 1: had ever had to do it before. And I don't
Speaker 1: know how many of our listeners are familiar with the
Speaker 1: old rotary dialing phones. Dialing on those could be really
Speaker 1: fun if you were a kid, but if you were
Speaker 1: an adult making the Earth fifth or six phone call
Speaker 1: that day, you would just sit there and hope that
Speaker 1: none of the numbers you had to call were in
Speaker 1: that nine range. Yeah, where you know, you dial and
Speaker 1: you just the whole thing click click, click click cick
Speaker 1: ci cick cick click. Good times. So by nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: Bell had was in control of seventy nine percent of
Speaker 1: national telecommunications market in the United States. They had made
Speaker 1: acquisitions throughout those years and had bought up smaller companies,
Speaker 1: so nearly of all telecommunications in the US falls under,
Speaker 1: that's an effectively a monopoly. Oh sure, right, right, and
Speaker 1: it's also up from what's that about seventy five only
Speaker 1: a few years ago. So yeah, so they were they
Speaker 1: were continuing to grow, and they were already practically the
Speaker 1: only game in town. So and a monopoly doesn't have
Speaker 1: to really be the only business, right, You don't have
Speaker 1: to be just the only one out there offering something.
Speaker 1: To have a monopoly, you just have to be so
Speaker 1: large that no one can realistically compete with you on
Speaker 1: any similar level. So let's say, for example, that Google
Speaker 1: were to to completely dominate search. They're they're pretty far
Speaker 1: in the lead. Let's say they completely dominated to the
Speaker 1: point where no other search engine is even close. Then
Speaker 1: Google would have to start worrying about being identified as
Speaker 1: a monopoly. And this is the funny thing is this
Speaker 1: 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 d. Yeah, you know, it's pocket 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 tele graph operations and kind of centralized all this
Speaker 1: because this was one of those examples of how technology
Speaker 1: outpaces 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 lawn 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 long 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 wield, 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 uh ninety seven, that's when
Speaker 1: Clinton Davidson of Bell Telephone Labs wins the Nobel Prize
Speaker 1: in 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 whole
Speaker 1: wave particle duality thing you can hear about in various
Speaker 1: types of particle physics, quantum mechanics, that kind of 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 ninety 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, uh, 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: all right. So now we're up to nineteen forty one.
Speaker 1: And we talked earlier about how Bell Labs was was
Speaker 1: pioneering coaxial cable development in the laboratory is when they
Speaker 1: actually installed the first non experimental coaxial cable for Bell
Speaker 1: service between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Steven's Point, Wisconsin. So this
Speaker 1: is physical cable they're laying down for the transmission of
Speaker 1: signals as opposed to transmitting them over the air, UM
Speaker 1: and UH and it was a success, ended up being
Speaker 1: the basis for the cable industry, also for the early
Speaker 1: internet industry. Pretty impressive stuff. Now, this is when World
Speaker 1: War Two is being waged around the world, mostly in
Speaker 1: the 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, mind, fuses,
Speaker 1: 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 three was when A T and T begins automation
Speaker 1: of long distance switching. So now there at this point
Speaker 1: the rolling it out would take years, sure, but but
Speaker 1: it was just not only local service but also across
Speaker 1: different local UH networks right right, local operators connecting to
Speaker 1: the long distance one. You were starting to see the
Speaker 1: switching become automated. UH. That would be a big it
Speaker 1: proven in efficiency to as of of American households had
Speaker 1: a telephone. The problem was they all wanted to call
Speaker 1: the other half. Yeah, so darned when are they When
Speaker 1: are the Johnson's game? That phone was when a T
Speaker 1: and T offers mobile telephone service in St. Louis, Missouri,
Speaker 1: and that it's not what you're thinking of. Well he
Speaker 1: had a car. Yeah, these were These were not the
Speaker 1: kind of handheld devices that that even Zach Morris would
Speaker 1: have many decades later. By the bell reference, that's that's
Speaker 1: that's after my time. But I get it. Um. I
Speaker 1: think each region of service had a single antenna which
Speaker 1: could handle about twenty calls at once at most most
Speaker 1: and sometimes it was between wellve and twenty. It all
Speaker 1: depended upon the antenna. Yeah. These were again using radio signals,
Speaker 1: sort of like those those transatlantic and Transpacific 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 a 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 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: we talked about these gentlemen before. There were three people
Speaker 1: in particular leading that project who ended up later on
Speaker 1: winning a Nobel Prize for that invention. That's John Bardine,
Speaker 1: Walter Brittaine, and then William Shockley. We talked about recently
Speaker 1: when we were talking about another company, Shockley's shocking views
Speaker 1: that led the some people to to become the Traitorous
Speaker 1: eight or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, and and and
Speaker 1: this transistor. We talked in the previous episode about vacue
Speaker 1: tubes being such a huge development in the telecommunications industry
Speaker 1: because they allowed for those first electro mechanical computers to
Speaker 1: to work. And the transistor was what would replace these
Speaker 1: 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 you for miniaturization, something
Speaker 1: that you couldn't do with vacuum tubes, which meant that
Speaker 1: our computers no longer would take up the space of
Speaker 1: a building, could eventually take up the space of you know,
Speaker 1: your pocket. 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 labs time.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I think we would have eventually seen the transistor,
Speaker 1: but it probably would have come out later, and it
Speaker 1: probably would have to get longer to get ramped up
Speaker 1: into a a form that would be manufacturable because this
Speaker 1: early transistor was not something you would put in any
Speaker 1: kind of electronics. It was more of a proof of concept.
Speaker 1: If you've ever seen a replica of it, it was enormous.
Speaker 1: I mean it's one transistor. Keep in mind that your
Speaker 1: average microprocessor could have a billion or more transistors on it.
Speaker 1: This thing was big enough to fit like it was,
Speaker 1: it would fit in the palm of your hand, but
Speaker 1: not the nets would Yeah. So so this is this
Speaker 1: is early days yet so I think our world would
Speaker 1: be significantly different had that not happened. So let's move
Speaker 1: on to Uh. That was when A T T began
Speaker 1: offering networking services for TV. Yeah, in the Northeast and
Speaker 1: the Midwest. So uh, you know. The way it would
Speaker 1: work is that your your networks, your big networks, would
Speaker 1: use this service to transmit programming to affiliated stations in
Speaker 1: different regions of the United States. So that way you
Speaker 1: could have like the Big Network broadcast out of someplace
Speaker 1: like New York and then have that sent to UH
Speaker 1: to an affiliate station that might be far across the country.
Speaker 1: This was also the year that A t T began
Speaker 1: to build its first microwave relay system between New York
Speaker 1: and Boston. And microwave relay is a an improvement on,
Speaker 1: or not an improvement, but but a parallel development on
Speaker 1: that radio transmission that we've been talking about. It's um
Speaker 1: it's a series of antennas or dishes that carry data
Speaker 1: via microwave, and these can be sent to narrow beams
Speaker 1: directly to the receiving devices, which means that you can
Speaker 1: have multiple devices working within the same bandwidth at the
Speaker 1: same time, so you dramatically increased capacity that way, right right, UM.
Speaker 1: You know, they've also got a higher bandwidth than other
Speaker 1: radio waves. But you do have to have a direct
Speaker 1: line of sight, which means that you know it's it's
Speaker 1: you can't have something behind a hill or behind a
Speaker 1: tree or behind a house. It's not gonna work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there were limitations, but still dramatic improvements in in
Speaker 1: being able to transmit information and both data and sass
Speaker 1: it would turn out. Uh. So moving on, we now
Speaker 1: get hit in nine with another antitrust suit. We don't
Speaker 1: actually uh, 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 my timeline. By 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 study 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 seventy percent of American households would have
Speaker 1: a telephone. So that's that's the range that it was
Speaker 1: growing a huge jump. Yeah, and back in nine that's
Speaker 1: also an A T and T introduced the five hundred
Speaker 1: series telephone, which was one of the most recognizable phones
Speaker 1: ever introduced. If you ever seen this. It's essentially the
Speaker 1: base station with the rotary dial on it, and then
Speaker 1: you have the back of it. The top back has
Speaker 1: the cradle where the handset sits. And uh, it's just
Speaker 1: one of 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 is
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
Speaker 1: your A T and T helped broadcast a live ends
Speaker 1: continental television show. Actually it was an address that President
Speaker 1: Harry Truman made to the Japan Peace Treaty Conference at
Speaker 1: the United Nations. So big, big development in in just
Speaker 1: television broadcast at that point, right. This was thanks to
Speaker 1: that to that microwave relay network that I was talking
Speaker 1: about that they had spent the past few years building.
Speaker 1: Um As of nineteen fifty one, it was a system
Speaker 1: of a hundred and seven towers, some thirty miles apart
Speaker 1: each and this telecast happened only a month after the
Speaker 1: very first call was placed via this microwave network. They
Speaker 1: moved up their telecast schedule by almost a month in
Speaker 1: order to accommodate President Truman. That's pretty incredible that they
Speaker 1: were able to accommodate that so quickly, considering that it
Speaker 1: was just recently it was new technology. Yeah, that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: Nineteen fifty four, for the first time, Western Electric begins
Speaker 1: 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. Six was the resolution of
Speaker 1: that anti trust lawsuit. Yeah, so this was a big deal.
Speaker 1: So part of the antitrust lawsuit meant that a T
Speaker 1: and T agreed to restrict itself to just dealing with
Speaker 1: the telephone industry and also occasionally doing any sort of
Speaker 1: projects for the federal government that was asked of it,
Speaker 1: but otherwise to stay out of other industries television, of
Speaker 1: the slowly burgeoning computer industry that was going on at
Speaker 1: the time. So essentially they were they were saying, all right,
Speaker 1: you know, we we don't want any trouble, Mr. United
Speaker 1: States Government. We will back off. So this is the
Speaker 1: first of that of that telco industry regulation. But we'll
Speaker 1: get into a one that directly affected A. T and
Speaker 1: T even more than this did another couple of decades,
Speaker 1: but see an even bigger one. Um that this particular
Speaker 1: consent decree also included a stipulation that A. T and
Speaker 1: T had to place its patents for the transistor which
Speaker 1: which our friends, uh the nice studely dudes Bardine and Britain,
Speaker 1: et cetera, and Shockley Yes, uh, they won the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize for it this year. Um, they had to place
Speaker 1: the patents for that transistor in the public domain and
Speaker 1: be willing to license their tech for about dollars, which,
Speaker 1: according to that Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator would be
Speaker 1: about two d and fifteen thousand dollars, right, And when
Speaker 1: you think about the benefit of transistors, it's it's fortunate
Speaker 1: that that happened, absolutely because imagine a world where a
Speaker 1: T and T had had held onto that for yeah,
Speaker 1: I had what if they had had exclusive rights to
Speaker 1: the transistor the way they had exclusive rights to the
Speaker 1: telephone company. Certainly, everything that we talked about in our
Speaker 1: in our last in our in our last few podcasts
Speaker 1: where we've talked about companies that were like fair Child
Speaker 1: Semiconductor and also things like Texas Instruments and other companies
Speaker 1: that that did pioneering work with transistors, obviously that would
Speaker 1: not have been the case had they not been allowed
Speaker 1: to license that technology. So yeah, big, big uh decision there.
Speaker 1: Also six was when service opened up for the TET one,
Speaker 1: which was the Transatlantic uh telephone cable. Now, this is
Speaker 1: a cable that actually did stretch all the way from
Speaker 1: the United States to Europe, and the initial capacity was
Speaker 1: for thirty six calls at a time, so much better
Speaker 1: than that one call at a time radio method they
Speaker 1: had been using decades before, and they were also of
Speaker 1: a higher quality. The calls that you could place than
Speaker 1: via radio, and the cost was a near twelve dollars
Speaker 1: for the first three minutes, which translates to about a
Speaker 1: hundred and three bucks today, So a hundred three dollar
Speaker 1: phone call for three minutes. And we're also slightly more secure.
Speaker 1: There is less chance of somebody else. It's a lot
Speaker 1: harder to tap into a phone line when it's underwater,
Speaker 1: more difficult, not that I speak from experience. Was also
Speaker 1: the year that the first picture phone system was tested.
Speaker 1: Uh and and by picture phone, I mean this is
Speaker 1: this isn't FaceTime, it's you know. It would send an
Speaker 1: image about once every two seconds. And we're gonna get
Speaker 1: a little bit more into picture phone shenanigans. In the
Speaker 1: following years, A T and T introduced the first commercial modem,
Speaker 1: which was meant for enterprise customers, not not average consumers.
Speaker 1: So it allowed for computers to make a direct connection
Speaker 1: to one another. There's not such a thing as as
Speaker 1: a network yet that that would come into play once
Speaker 1: our PA net really would give her a would rise
Speaker 1: up in a couple of years. But modems, of course,
Speaker 1: became very important for that kind of technology to exist.
Speaker 1: A T. And also began research work in lasers and
Speaker 1: fiber optics. That again another transformative technology in telecommunications. Speaking
Speaker 1: of transformative technologies, I believe you have a really important note.
Speaker 1: I included this one just for Lauren because Lauren's a girl.
Speaker 1: You know, girls like pink. So I know this because
Speaker 1: the technology industries have taught me numerous times by all
Speaker 1: the pink electronics that are out there, that pink is
Speaker 1: for girls, and girls like pink, and if you don't
Speaker 1: like pink, then something's wrong, right, right, absolutely? Yeah. So anyway,
Speaker 1: obviously I don't really believe any of that, but the
Speaker 1: introduction of the Pink Princess Phone game in nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: and then I have a note here which says, don't
Speaker 1: hit me, Lauren, Lauren, please don't hit me. All Right,
Speaker 1: we know 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 that point. 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. So the Tellstar one allowed for actual
Speaker 1: live transmission of television across the Atlantic. Yeah. And and
Speaker 1: the first phone call transferred through space was between the
Speaker 1: A T and T chairman and the Vice President of
Speaker 1: the United States within thirty minutes. That also tested live
Speaker 1: and taped television and other data. That the whole project
Speaker 1: was a collaboration with NASA actually, but it was the
Speaker 1: first privately sponsored space launch. Yeah, and now look at
Speaker 1: our world. Private private sponsored space launches are are becoming
Speaker 1: the way that we're getting into space these days. Nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty 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 a an old phone with a keypad.
Speaker 1: And some of you guys just don't even know what
Speaker 1: that is. All your all your buttons have appeared on
Speaker 1: the screen. It's it's what the buttons replicate on a screen. Mom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to skew more fic dial pad where it's
Speaker 1: the rotary top pad. I'm sure there has to be one,
Speaker 1: oh something for me to not one of you clever
Speaker 1: app makers out there do that. The rotary dial dial face.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I would give myself. I would
Speaker 1: just be less likely to make phone calls, which I
Speaker 1: guess is a good thing in the wrong run. I
Speaker 1: no one wants to hear from me anyway, I'm alright.
Speaker 1: A T T opens t PC one, which was the
Speaker 1: first submarine telephone cable across the Pacific. So this stretched
Speaker 1: from Japan to Hawaii and they're connected to two cables
Speaker 1: that linked Hawaii with the mainland. Um so Experimental Picture
Speaker 1: Phone service also begins in some cities and talked about that. Right.
Speaker 1: It was installed specifically in exhibits at Disneyland and at
Speaker 1: the New York World's Fair. Yea, so again, I had
Speaker 1: a motor 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. Nineteen six, A T and T
Speaker 1: installs a special purpose computer which was the first electronic
Speaker 1: telephone switch in a local telephone exchange in New Jersey.
Speaker 1: And I believe that first which was the four E
Speaker 1: S S, which could handle about five hundred thousand calls
Speaker 1: per hour, which was ten times the amount of the
Speaker 1: standard electro mechanical switch could handle exactly. So now we're
Speaker 1: moving into the digital age and beyond the electro mechanical age.
Speaker 1: Nineteen sixty eight, A T and T introduces nine one
Speaker 1: one as the US nationwide emergency number, first rolled out
Speaker 1: in Huntington's Indiana. Other countries have their own emergency numbers,
Speaker 1: and UH, I have to mention, you know, according to
Speaker 1: the I T crowd, apparently the UK just changed it
Speaker 1: to O one eight nine nine nine eight eight one
Speaker 1: nine nine to five three. I had to put that
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah, incredibly important. UM. As of nineteen of
Speaker 1: American households had a phone line. Finally, slackers. They just
Speaker 1: didn't have anyone they wanted to talk to. Nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: T and T introduces customer dialing for international long distance
Speaker 1: telephone calls, starting with Manhattan and London. UM. Also that year,
Speaker 1: a commercial picture phone service debut in downtown Pittsburgh and
Speaker 1: and went absolutely nowhere. Basically nobody cared at all. I
Speaker 1: think they were like, this is cumbersome and kind of stupid,
Speaker 1: and I don't want it. I think for a lot
Speaker 1: of us, video calls are still kind of slow to
Speaker 1: be adopted because it means having to keep some part
Speaker 1: of your house pristine so that the people who are
Speaker 1: calling you don't realize how you really live. I'm always
Speaker 1: really nervous about about web web chat calls at work
Speaker 1: because I'm like, oh, crap, what's going on in the background.
Speaker 1: Is Josh doing something inappropriate back there? You know? But
Speaker 1: like by inappropriate, I mean like using the swords that
Speaker 1: Chuck has to have a fight with someone else in
Speaker 1: the editorial department, not that he would ever do that
Speaker 1: again Labs produced the Unix operating system. Yeah. Huge development here.
Speaker 1: So the idea was to create an operating system that
Speaker 1: was platform independent, meaning that you could put this operating
Speaker 1: system on different types of computers. Because keep in mind,
Speaker 1: in the early days, a lot of these computers had
Speaker 1: proprietary systems that they would operate on, and that was it.
Speaker 1: You could not have. You couldn't run the same kind
Speaker 1: of software for one computer and an on a yeah,
Speaker 1: because exactly because they did, they weren't compatible. You had
Speaker 1: to recompile all of your programming into a different language
Speaker 1: so I would run on a different computer. This was
Speaker 1: kind of an attempt to allow A T and T
Speaker 1: to have a computer system where it didn't really matter
Speaker 1: what hardware they had as long as it could run
Speaker 1: this operating system. They could run the same software across
Speaker 1: the multiple divisions. Huge development. Absolutely. Um In nineteen seven,
Speaker 1: D five, armed partially with this, a T T begin
Speaker 1: to computerize its operations. Yeah. Yeah, and the computers could
Speaker 1: handle a much larger call volume. Like you mentioned earlier, Lauren,
Speaker 1: that that one switch was a good example. So we're
Speaker 1: starting to see, uh a rapid rollout of development, although
Speaker 1: it would take probably ten years for this to be
Speaker 1: uh to be complete, because you know, it's a huge infrastructure, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, you're talking about a nationwide telephone service. So
Speaker 1: it's not like you just flip a switch and suddenly
Speaker 1: everything's magically in computer world, right right. Um. Yeah, In fact,
Speaker 1: it would take until to complete the transition. So that's true.
Speaker 1: The very last toll switch was completed in so even
Speaker 1: longer than I said ten years. I was way off.
Speaker 1: Ninety six that's when m c I filed an antitrust
Speaker 1: suit against A T and T. Now they had started
Speaker 1: looking at the possibility of pursuing this kind of uh
Speaker 1: legal action back in the you know, a little earlier
Speaker 1: in the seventies. They met with the Department of Justice,
Speaker 1: but A T and T ended up disconnecting m c
Speaker 1: i s foreign exchange customers. Kind of it doesn't say
Speaker 1: directly in response to m c I asking the d
Speaker 1: o J about this, but you might be able to
Speaker 1: draw that conclusion. So with this antitrust lawsuit filed against
Speaker 1: A T and T, the Department of Justice would then
Speaker 1: look into the matter and file its own antitrust lawsuit
Speaker 1: against A T and T. In nineteen seventy seven, So
Speaker 1: that will come into play in just a couple of years.
Speaker 1: Where that's that's the big one we talk about the
Speaker 1: big this this lawsuit would go on for six years. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in seventy seven, besides the fact that the d
Speaker 1: o J brought an antitrust lawsuit against it, A T
Speaker 1: and T also opened the first network operations center in
Speaker 1: New Jersey. Now, this allowed A T and T to
Speaker 1: have a centralized location where they can have real time
Speaker 1: management of its entire long distance network. Instead of having
Speaker 1: a bunch of regional offices that all coordinate together, they
Speaker 1: could actually control everything from one spot, like you know,
Speaker 1: the Empire. That same year, A T and T installed
Speaker 1: the first fiber optic cable in a commercial communication system,
Speaker 1: so using light as opposed to electricity through a copper wire.
Speaker 1: Night on the On his first day on the bench,
Speaker 1: Judge Harold Green drew the A T and T Anti
Speaker 1: trust case. Can you imagine that your first day on
Speaker 1: the bench as a judge and you draw the A
Speaker 1: T and T Anti trust case. I think that must
Speaker 1: in fact be where jokes about like the cases of
Speaker 1: the Mondays come from. That's pretty ridiculous. A case of
Speaker 1: many years of mondays for that poor judge nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: All right, So in the United States they had about
Speaker 1: a hundred seventy five million, five thirty five thousand telephones active,
Speaker 1: give or take a few, and Bell had more than
Speaker 1: a million employees. That's incredible, a million people working for
Speaker 1: this company. That's phenomenal. M c I wins its antitrust
Speaker 1: loss it against A T and T and the United
Speaker 1: States versus A T and T goes to trial. So
Speaker 1: the m c I lawsuits over, but the Department of
Speaker 1: Justices lawsuits. Yeah. So that brings us to January two.
Speaker 1: We're gonna end on this year and we'll pick up
Speaker 1: in night in our next podcast. But six years of
Speaker 1: this federal antitrust case going on in some form or another,
Speaker 1: A T and T is up against the wall. They
Speaker 1: have really very few options. So they agree to divest
Speaker 1: themselves of the seven regional Bell Operating UH company carriers
Speaker 1: that they owned. So like the big ones, which also
Speaker 1: represented smaller companies inside it was up until this point
Speaker 1: um generally referred to as mob bell. And yeah, all
Speaker 1: the different bell system Southwestern Bell, Bell South, you had,
Speaker 1: you know all these If you've ever heard a company
Speaker 1: with Bell in the title of it as a telephone company.
Speaker 1: It belonged to this at the at the time. So
Speaker 1: A T. T essentially is getting rid of all of
Speaker 1: its local calling service. It's staying as a long distance carrier.
Speaker 1: And it also as a sort of a concession, I
Speaker 1: guess you could say, you know, it had to get
Speaker 1: rid of all this local stuff so that it could
Speaker 1: no longer kind of maintain this monopoly. But in return
Speaker 1: it was allowed to go into computer systems. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: our computer communication business. Yeah, and it lift this, lifted
Speaker 1: that that band we talked about from the nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: six judgment. So now while A T and T has
Speaker 1: to get rid of all those other companies, and it
Speaker 1: would take a couple of years for them to do this.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously you can't just do this overnight either,
Speaker 1: but for them that you know, in return, they get
Speaker 1: to go into this new industry. Um. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of a you know, silver lining kind of thing, if
Speaker 1: you want to look at it that way. And I
Speaker 1: think it would turn out, considering the very fast gains
Speaker 1: in Internet popularity over the next couple of decades, to
Speaker 1: be completely worthwhile. Well, especially considering that that separation of
Speaker 1: a T and T, and those Bell operating companies wouldn't
Speaker 1: last for all of them. But that's a spoiler alert. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so a T and T would end up reabsorbing Western Electric,
Speaker 1: it would become part of a T and T. Formally
Speaker 1: it was no longer spun off. Also, the Bell operating
Speaker 1: companies would not be allowed to offer a long distance service,
Speaker 1: so A T T would remain the long distance carrier.
Speaker 1: The Bell operating companies would become local carriers, and neither
Speaker 1: was supposed to engage in the other's business. So uh,
Speaker 1: I mean apart from a T T allowing the interconnections,
Speaker 1: but a T T could not go into local service.
Speaker 1: Bell operating companies cannot go into long distance service. Um.
Speaker 1: And also the Bell companies couldn't go into information service
Speaker 1: or manufacturing. Uh. And everyone was supposed to provide equal
Speaker 1: access to all long distance companies. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you couldn't have Bell South say that A T T
Speaker 1: was the exclusive long distance carrier. Bell South customers had
Speaker 1: to have choice. So that's was supposed to set, you know,
Speaker 1: put us all back at square one, reset the playing field,
Speaker 1: we're all on level ground. That was the intent, But
Speaker 1: I think we'll use our next episode to talk about
Speaker 1: how well that turned out, all right, I think it
Speaker 1: was really more you know, it wasn't It wasn't leveling
Speaker 1: a playing field that was giving luxury blimps to the
Speaker 1: people at the top of the playing field to kind
Speaker 1: of gently coast downwards a little bit, maybe diamond encrusted
Speaker 1: uh landing pads for their golden parachutes. Anyway, we might
Speaker 1: get a little snarky in our final episode on a
Speaker 1: T and T, but look forward to that. That will
Speaker 1: be our next one. And if you have a suggestion
Speaker 1: for future episodes of tech Stuff, please let's know. We've
Speaker 1: had a lot of people writing in recently, which is fantastic.
Speaker 1: It is, yeah, yeah, and we would love to start
Speaker 1: um to start reading some of you or some of
Speaker 1: you guys have really terrific and wonderful insights on the
Speaker 1: things that we're saying and on different segments of the industry,
Speaker 1: and we love hearing those. And we're going to bring
Speaker 1: back without alarm class and some listener mail, so we'll
Speaker 1: discuss the alarm class all right, So yeah, right, us
Speaker 1: Our address is tech Stuff at Discovery dot com or
Speaker 1: get in touch with us on our social media sites
Speaker 1: that we inhabit or that we don't own them. Now
Speaker 1: I say this every time, but yeah, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
Speaker 1: you can find us there. Tech stuff, H. S. W
Speaker 1: and Lauren and I will talk to you again, maybe
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