During my life, I’ve seen many changes in this now ubiquitous communication device.
It’s hard to imagine Life without the phone, but there was a time – yes kids, for hundreds and even thousands of years – when humans didn’t have it at their fingertips to connect them with others and — since 2007 – the Internet.
But the phone – invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 – has obviously transformed our lives in so many ways.
And while Bell is credited with the invention of the phone in the late 19th century, it wasn’t until the 1920s that its use became fairly widespread across America.
So, the telephone has been around for about 100 years. But oh, so many changes in those 10 decades.
Early phones needed an operator to complete a call. It wasn’t until the early 1950s when a person could just pick up a phone and dial a number – at first with a rotary dialer and later – in 1963 – by pushing buttons.
For about 60 years, all phones had to be plugged into a wall connection until the advent of the cell phone in the late 1980s.
Those first bulky cell phones with the pullout antennas morphed into the pocket-sized flip-phones so popular in the 1990s.
All through the 1990s, people were avidly buying cellphones as service providers built signal towers across the nation to make them function.
Then – in 2007 – everything changed with the first real “smartphone” that could connect to the Internet, take and send photos, send and receive emails and perform a host of other applications almost too numerous to mention.
It’s like having a computer, a camera, and a telephone in the palm of your hand. They are the phones our kids and grandkids have grown up with -- and they LOVE them.
Me, I’ve had a slightly less amorous feeling about cell/smartphones.
I grew up in a time when the phone was plugged into a wall – in my home – and if I wasn’t there when someone called, I simply missed the call. They had to call back when I was there to answer it.
Later came the message/answering machine, which would record a message you could listen to when you got home.
Crude, but effective.
And when I was out of the house and needed to make a call, public telephone booths were everywhere and I would drop a few coins into a slot and talk into a dirty mouthpiece that who knows if it was ever cleaned.
Very crude, but also effective.
Those were simpler times, and I was OK with all that.
Now, we live in a time when many -- if not most people -- wouldn’t go anywhere without their phone. It’s literally become an extension of who we are.
I’ve resisted becoming one of those people, but the future is calling.
And you need a smartphone to answer that call.
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