From Bell to Cell

The other day, during my morning walk, I was suddenly stopped in my tracks by a three-year-old doing something that was unthinkable in my childhood.

The toddler, daughter of the street vegetable seller, was talking on her mobile phone to her grandfather in a village in Uttar Pradesh.

What a transformation of this magic means of communication that Alexander Graham Bell invented more than a century ago! How the telephone, once the preserve of the rich, the business class and to some extent the bureaucrats, has become common place — literally so — today!

The telephone remained a status symbol for long in India. One had to wait for years to get a connection. The red tape and corruption made matters worse. The rich and politically influential jumped the Q and came to possess the instrument out of turn.

Come to think of, it we have come a long way in the matter of technology, especially with the help of sophisticated satellites. The line from any remote corner to the other end is so clear today. It was unbelievable till not long ago.

The whole town heard you!

I find myself grow with the technology. During the early 1960s, in my teens in Tuticorin, a small town in Tamil Nadu, the big, black instrument had no dialling facility. You just lifted the receiver and from the other end came the voice, “Number please.” It was that of the operator in the local telephone exchange. Then you gave the number, just three or four digits, if I remember right. You got your line in a few seconds.

Before the electronic exchanges, the lines used to be terribly disturbed, especially the trunk calls. When the call you booked at the local post office materialised, often after a few hours, you shouted at the top of your voice to be audible to the receiver at the other end, may be just 10 km away. The rest of the town would be able to hear you, but not the intended person at the other end!

The first communication revolution came during the 1980s with the Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD). STD telephone booths sprang up at railway stations, airports and bus terminals and then spread to small shops all over the country. People-to-people contact on the move became easy.

The mobile telephone made its appearance in India during the 1990s. The instrument was big and heavy compared with what you have today. Only rich businessmen and professionals, such as doctors, possessed them. Mobiles became a priceless asset to the profession of journalism as well.

April anniversaries

This April marked anniversaries of two famous incidents in the history of telephones.

“Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell” — the telephone pioneer’s voice was identified earlier this month for the first time on a wax disc recording from 1885. It was recorded on to the disc on April 15, 1885, at his Volta laboratory in Washington.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, through a collaborative project with the Library of Congress and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, identified Bell’s voice.

The now ubiquitous cell phone had a quiet, noiseless 40th birthday on April 3. The first hand-held mobile phone was demonstrated by John F Mitchell and Dr Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing around 2.2 pounds (around 1 kg).

Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973, to his rival, Dr Joel S Engel of Bell Labs. The new invention sold for $3,995 and weighed two pounds, leading to the nickname “the brick”. And the calls cost you dearly, both for outgoing and incoming.

Meanwhile, the vegetable seller’s baby continues to blabber in to the mobile weighing less than one-tenth of the original instrument and costing a fraction of the original cost, symbolising inclusive growth in a key area of development.

From ‘Bell to Cell’, the world has come a long way indeed.

(The author, formerly with PTI, is a New Delhi-based freelance journalist)

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