10 Facts About the Telecommunications

Industry

By Richard Horowitz

1. The original name for the telephone was the “harmonic telegraph”.

2. It took a year to connect the first telephone line between New York and San Francisco. This line was comprised of 14,000 miles of copper wire and needed 130,000 telephone poles in order to successfully connect the two cities.

3. The first coin telephone was installed in 1990.

4. The longest phone cable in the world is a submarine cable called Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, or FLAG.

5. The 911 system was first introduced in the United States in 1968.

6. Cellular car phones were introduced in 1985.

7. The telephone is the most profitable invention in US

history.

8. The busiest organization in the world is the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The Pentagon has 34,500 lines and gets 1 million calls a day. The busiest day occurred on the 59th Anniversary of D-Day, when they received over 1.5 million phone calls.

9. The telephone is the most used piece of communication equipment in the world.

10. Alexander Graham Bell originally wanted the greeting for the telephone to be “Ahoy” but Thomas Edison voted for “Hello,” a term he coined back in 1877.