A History of Telecommunications

John Tysoe, Alan Knott-Craig

• Publisher: Bookstorm
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781928257738
• eBook ISBN: 9781928257745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

'Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.'It's been almost 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell said these immortal words on the first ever phone call, to his assistant in the next room. Between 10 March 1876 and now, the world has changed beyond recognition. And telecommunications, which has played a fundamental role in this change, has itself evolved into an industry that was the sole preserve of science fiction.When the world's first modern mobile telephone network was launched in 1979, there were just over 300 million telephones. Today, there are more than eight billion, most of which are mobile. Most people in most countries can now contact each other in a matter of seconds. Soon we'll all be connected, to each other, and to complex computer networks that provide us with instant information, but also observe and record our actions. No other phenomenon touches so many of us, so directly, each and every day of our lives.This book describes how this transformation came about. It considers the technologies that underpin telecommunications – microcircuits, fibre-optics and satellites – and touches on financial aspects of the industry: privatisations, mergers and takeovers that have helped shape the $2-trillion telecom market. But for the most part, it's a story about us and our need to communicate.

CHAPTER 1

In the beginning

For almost all history, mankind’s ability to communicate was limited in both range and content. Prehistoric tribes used fire or smoke signals as warnings, and drums and horns were used in battle, but whatever the medium, it was restricted by the range of human senses: only the largest fire creates a glow that can be seen over the curve of the Earth, while even the loudest drums can’t be heard more than a few miles away.

This is not to say that early man lacked ingenuity. On the contrary. Cyrus the Great of Persia established a functioning postal system in the 6th century BCE to facilitate communications across his vast empire. And within a hundred years of Cyrus, other Persians and some Assyrians were using pigeons to carry messages. Crude cryptography appears shortly after, with the Greek creation of the hydraulic telegraph.1 In China during the Han dynasty (200 BCE to 200 CE) a complex system of flag signals was developed, sending messages along the Great Wall and beyond.

For the best part of the next two thousand years the situation stayed much the same, with semaphore and signalling not advancing to any great degree and suffering many of the same limitations. The development of telescopes extended the range of these networks, but that was of little use on a dark or rainy day and no use at all at night.

More fundamentally, the content of the messages sent over these networks was inflexible, as it had to be predetermined and agreed by both sender and receiver. This limitation was slightly ameliorated by the use of coloured flags in naval signalling, but that required a greater level of sophistication on the parts of the operators.

This all changed in the late 18th century thanks to the efforts of various European scientists and inventors. In the 1790s French inventor Claude Chappe came up with the ‘tachygraph’ (meaning ‘fast writer’), an optical semaphore system that transmitted visual signals over a network of physical high points.2 In 1795 Spanish scientist Francisco Salva Campillo produced a device that transmitted electrical signals representing individual letters over a network of cables.

In 1816 Englishman Francis Ronalds created the first working telegraph over a substantial distance, laying an eight-mile (13-kilometre) length of iron wire between wooden frames and sending pulses down it using electrostatic generators. And in 1832 Russian aristocrat Pavel Lvovitch Schilling created a machine that used a single needle and a system of codes to generate individual characters.

The achievement of producing the world’s first truly commercial telegraph network fell to two Englishmen, inventor William Fothergill Cooke and academic Charles Wheatstone, in 1837. Their telegraph used a combination of five needles, each with its own wire, which could point to some 20 separate characters arranged in a grid pattern on a board.3

In 1839 the Great Western Railway commissioned a Wheatstone and Cooke telegraph line running from Paddington Station in London out to West Drayton, a small town some 12 miles (20 kilometres) to the west. This line is famous for having carried the first telegraph used to apprehend a criminal. In 1845 a certain John Tawell poisoned his mistress in her home outside Slough, before boarding a train to London. Tracked by a member of the local constabulary to the station, his destination and appearance were sent ahead to Paddington, where an arrest was made. Large crowds attended the subsequent hanging and the notoriety of the affair helped push the new technology firmly into the public consciousness.4

At around the same time, across the Atlantic Ocean in the United States, portrait painter Samuel Morse was spurred into turning his attention to electrical communications after his wife died in 1825. He’d missed both her death and the funeral because at the time he was away from home completing a commission and the news took too long to reach him. Eventually, in 1837, he patented his invention and made the telegraph his own.

The years that followed were characterised by enhancements to and developments of the basic telegraphic concept and its means of delivery. The first public telegraph line was opened in 1845 between London and Gosport in Hampshire (an important base for Britain’s Royal Navy at the time) and the first transmission over this network was Queen Victoria’s speech on the opening of parliament. In 1850 the first subsea telegraph was transmitted, from Dover to France, and by 1858, the Atlantic had been crossed, with a cable stretching from Ireland to Newfoundland.5

By the middle of the 19th century, telegraph networks were being established in most of the world’s industrialised countries. In France (and elsewhere in continental Europe) the business of telegraphy had begun as a private enterprise but very quickly fell under the control of the state, nationalised in 1851 by King Louis Philippe and merged into a single entity.

In Britain, by contrast, multiple operators, most privately owned, set up shop. The first, the Electric Telegraph Company (ETC), was established in 1845 by William Fothergill Cooke and his new partner, John Lewis Ricardo. The ETC used the technology patented by Cooke and Wheatstone and grew rapidly, assisted by the expansion of the rail networks, many of which now used telegraphy to facilitate signalling.

In 1850 a second operator, the British Telegraph Company, was launched, using a telegraph system developed by civil engineer Edward Highton. In quick succession, several more newcomers, some with specific regional focus, entered the market, including the English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company, the London District Telegraph Company, the United Kingdom Electric Telegraph Company and the Universal Private Telegraph Company.

At the same time, a few special-purpose companies were being formed to provide communications over particular international routes. The Submarine Telegraph Company was formed in 1851 to operate an exclusive concession given it by the French government. A year later, ETC created a subsidiary called the International Telegraph Company to address a similar opportunity in Holland.

By the end of the decade, this trickle had become a raging torrent, thanks in large part to an occurrence that had taken place half a world away from Britain.

News of the 1857 ‘Indian Mutiny’, or First War of Independence, which was started in Meerut by Indian troops in the service of the British East India Company and spread to Delhi, Agra, Kanpur and Lucknow, didn’t reach London until a full 30 days after its inception. Although there were telegraph systems in use in India at the time, they were essentially domestic and, once at the coast, messages had to be carried by boat to the next telegraph point, or indeed the whole way. Moreover, the Indians had cut most of the lines at the start of the rebellion.

The British government determined that it should never be caught on the wrong foot again and encouraged entrepreneurs to create companies to provide end-to-end telegraph links. In quick succession numerous international cable companies sprang into being, including the British Indian Submarine Telegraph Company, the Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company, the Marseilles, Algiers and Malta Telegraph Company, the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company, and the Eastern Telegraph Company (later to become part of Cable & Wireless).

In the mid-1860s, postal-services reformer Frank Ives Scudamore began campaigning for the nationalisation of the industry, suggesting that the privately held telegraph system in the UK compared unfavourably to the state-controlled monopolies on the other side of the English Channel. Despite protestations from the companies, various Acts were passed and the entire inland telegraph system came under control of the Post Office in 1870. It would take 115 years for this decision to be reversed.

The industry structure in the US was similar to that in Britain. Privately owned telegraph companies, most with limited regional ambitions, proliferated, though none was interconnected. The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Company, formed in 1851, however, aimed to create a national telegraph network using Samuel Morse’s technology. By 1856 it had acquired 11 other networks and its reach extended to St Joseph, Missouri, a distance of over 1,100 kilometres. At this point it decided to change its name to something less regional and more memorable – and became the Western Union Telegraph Company. It dropped the word ‘telegraph’ a few years later.

When Civil War broke out in 1861, Western Union offered to build the government a chain of interlinked telegraph stations. Almost everyone thought the company was reckless, if not entirely deranged. Abraham Lincoln told Western Union’s president Hiram Siley, ‘I think it’s a wild scheme. It will be next to impossible to get your poles and materials distributed down on the plains, and as fast as you complete the line, the Indians will cut it down.’6

The task of expanding the network westward from St Joseph began on 4 July 1861 and the line reached Salt Lake City, 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometres) away, on 24 October – Siley’s men were covering a distance of over 13 miles (20 kilometres) a day, every day.

In October 1861 a young self-taught German electrician called Philipp Reis demonstrated a device he’d constructed to the Scientific Society of Frankfurt-am-Main. It consisted of a diaphragm that captured sound and converted it into electrical impulses, which it then transmitted over electrical wires to a device that reversed the process and reproduced the original captured sound. Reis called his invention a telephon.

On 14 February 1876, a young Scottish engineer, Alexander Graham Bell, filed a patent in his adopted country, the US, for an apparatus capable of transmitting speech. Mere hours later a similar application was made by Elisha Gray, a superintendent employed by Western Union. Bell was granted US Patent No 174,465 on 7 March and went on to achieve universal, lasting fame. Gray sank into relative obscurity, though he is now considered to be the father of the modern music synthesiser, and was granted over 70 patents for other inventions.7

Bell spent much of the rest of 1876 trying to improve his invention and make it a commercial proposition. This proved far harder than he’d expected. His financial backers, Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Hubbard, were beginning to despair and offered their rights in the patent to Western Union for $100,000 (roughly $2,350,000 in current value).8

In what could be the most extreme case of technological myopia ever, Western Union declined. The committee set up to consider the offer called the device ‘hardly more than a toy’ and declared it was ‘of no use’. It concluded, ‘We do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles. Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of their “telephone devices” in every city. The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?’9

Bell somehow managed to persuade his backers otherwise, and incorporated the Bell Telephone Company in 1877 with Hubbard as president and Sanders as treasurer. Thomas Watson, the man Bell had summoned during that famous first call, took the post of ‘general superintendent’, while Bell himself had the title ‘electrician’. The Bell Telephone Company began, at last, to gain some traction, with licences granted to independent operators to establish networks in New York, Boston and Chicago.

In 1878 a second company, the New England Telephone Company, was licensed to operate in the six states that comprise New England.

It didn’t take Western Union long to realise that it had made a huge blunder. When one of its subsidiaries abandoned the use of telegraphy in favour of Bell’s invention, it recognised that the telephone represented an existential threat, so it quickly hired the brightest people it could lay its hands on to create a company that could start up in competition.

In December 1877 the American Speaking Telephone Company, a business whose sole purpose was to compete with Bell, was established, and Elisha Gray was brought in, as was a young inventor called Thomas A Edison. Edison brought with him a design for a transmitter that was far better than the one used by Bell and this, together with Western Union’s existing network of 250,000 telegraph cables, could have proved enough to kill the new business before it had really begun.

Bell’s company took the only real option available to it and filed a suit for patent infringement in early 1878. The case would run for the best part of two years, before Bell eventually emerged victorious in November 1879. The settlement saw Western Union relinquish all of its telephone patents and hand over the 56,000 phone lines it had connected, expanding Bell’s installed base to some 133,000 phones. In return, Bell agreed not to enter the telegraph business and to pay Western Union a 20% share of Bell’s income from the rental of telephone handsets for the remaining 17 years its patents had to run.

In 1879 a new general manager, 33-year-o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: In the beginning
• Chapter 2: New technologies for a new century
• Chapter 3: Going mobile
• Chapter 4: Vodafone – the mobile industry’s dynamo
• Chapter 5: Consolidation in the USA
• Chapter 6: The transition to digital
• Chapter 7: Vodafone’s path to independence
• Chapter 8: Competition encourages growth
• Chapter 9: Preparing for 1998
• Chapter 10: The hunting season
• Chapter 11: Information-superhighway robbery
• Chapter 12: The new superpower
• Chapter 13: Transition
• Chapter 14: The arrival of the mobile internet
• Chapter 15: Consolidation, convergence and the struggle for value
• Chapter 16: Sibling rivalry
• Chapter 17: Today and tomorrow
• Appendix 1: The major players
• Appendix 2: The multinationals in the developing world
• Appendix 3: Industry timeline
• Appendix 4: Mobile industry subscriber milestones
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements