Networking Timeline

Telecommunications Evolutions Timeline Paper

From Party line to online: The telephone had as big an impact on the 20th century as the Industrial Revolution had on the 19th century. It changed the way we live, work and play--and contributed to the invention of television, computers, pagers, fax machines, e-mail, the Internet, online stock trading and more. In the next decade we can expect wireless Internet connections in your car or briefcase, phone numbers you keep for life and voice activated dialing at the touch of a button at home, work, or on the go.

1870s-1910s

1876: Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone

1881: First telephone Yellow Pages directory

1891: First dial phone; 512,000 phones in the U.S.

1887: First coin-operated telephone installed in the Hartford Bank by the payphone's inventor, William Gray.

1915: The first "official" coast-to-coast call is made from Alexander Graham Bell in New York City to Thomas Watson in San Francisco.

1920s

1929: Herbert Hoover becomes first president of the United States with a phone on his desk. Until this time, the president talked on a phone from outside a booth outside his executive office

1950s-1960s

1957: Field tests for the first pagers begin in Allentown and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

1958: Princess Phone introduced. First phone with a lighted dial, became a part of American pop culture

1960: The first Touch-Tone telephones are test-marketed in Findlay, Ohio. These telephones had 10 buttons, rather than the 12 buttons of today

1963: Hotline established between White House and Kremlin following the Cuban missile crisis

1968: 911 chosen as the nationwide emergency number. The nation's telephone companies agree to make this three-digit sequence unavailable as an exchange number

1970s-1980s

1972: First e-mail message. The term "Internet" is used for the first time two years later, but the concept of the Internet as we know it today didn't evolve until later

1984: First cellular phones

1990s

1991:...