50 Fun Facts About Telecommunications

Which teacher of the deaf was awarded the first US patent for the telephone in 1876?

Alexander Graham Bell got the telephone working three days after the patent was issued, calling his assistant in from the next room. His study of speech and hearing had led him to the idea.

Which short-range wireless technology is named after a tenth-century Danish king called Harald?

Bluetooth was the nickname of King Harald, who united Denmark's tribes much as the technology was meant to unite devices. Its logo merges the runes for his initials.

Which greeting was the world's first SMS text message, sent by engineer Neil Papworth in 1992?

Merry Christmas was typed on a personal computer, not a phone, and sent over Vodafone's network to the Orbitel 901 handset of a colleague, Richard Jarvis.

Which distress signal is sent in Morse code as three dots, three dashes and three dots?

SOS was adopted in 1906 purely as a rhythm that was hard to mistake, so it originally stood for nothing at all. The letters were only a handy way to remember the dots and dashes.

Which Hollywood star co-patented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes in 1942?

Hedy Lamarr worked out the jam-proof scheme with composer George Antheil, drawing on his experience of synchronising player pianos. Frequency hopping later became a foundation of spread-spectrum links.

Which US mail service closed in 1861, two days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed?

Pony Express riders could not compete with a wire that crossed the continent in moments. The service had run for only about 18 months and never made money.

Which infrastructure carries about 99 percent of the data traffic that crosses the world's oceans?

Submarine cables do the heavy lifting even though their deep-sea stretches are typically only about 25 mm across. Satellites handle a tiny share because cables are faster and far cheaper per bit.

Which company, founded in 1865 as a pulp mill, led the world in mobile phone sales from 1998?

Nokia took its name from the Finnish town beside its second mill, and spent decades in rubber and cables before phones made it a household name.

Which greeting did the telephone's first patent holder use on calls, before 'hello' caught on?

Ahoy was borrowed from the call used on ships. 'Hello' won out after a rival inventor recommended it in an 1877 letter to a telephone company president.

Which liner's sinking led to rules that radio sets on passenger ships be manned around the clock?

Titanic struck ice ten minutes after the only radio operator on the nearby Californian shut down his set for the night and went to bed.

Which wireless telegraphy pioneer shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ferdinand Braun?

Guglielmo Marconi came to be widely credited as the inventor of radio. In 1901 he reported picking up a signal sent across the Atlantic, a direct challenge to the established telegraph companies.

Which transmission medium carries data as pulses of light through hair-thin strands of glass?

Optical fiber strands are about as thick as a human hair, so each gets a protective coating to survive being bundled into cables and installed.

In the SIM card that identifies a phone on a mobile network, what does the letter S stand for?

Subscriber is the S in subscriber identity module. The first SIM cards were made in 1991 by a Munich smart-card firm, which sold a batch of 300 to a Finnish network operator.

In mobile network names such as 4G and 5G, what does the letter G stand for?

Generation is the G: each number marks a new family of cellular technology that replaces the one before, which makes 5G simply the fifth and the successor to 4G.

Which company's engineer Martin Cooper made the first public handheld cell phone call in 1973?

Motorola's Cooper used the prototype DynaTAC to ring his counterpart at a competing lab from the sidewalk, shortly before a press conference at the New York Hilton.

Which 1962 satellite relayed the first live television signal across the Atlantic Ocean?

Telstar worked for only a few months, because radiation from high-altitude nuclear tests, one of them the day before launch, wrecked its fragile electronics.

Which three-digit number, introduced in London in 1937, is the world's oldest emergency call service?

999 followed a fatal London house fire during which a neighbour was left queueing for the exchange. The digits could be dialled by feel in darkness or thick smoke.

Which country, with France on +33 and Germany on +49, has the international dialling code +44?

United Kingdom callers are reached on +44 once the leading 0 of the number is dropped, and the same code also covers Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

Which company dominated American telegraphy for a century and now runs a money-transfer business?

Western Union strung the first telegraph line across the continent in 1861 and began wiring money ten years later. It left the communications business entirely in 2006.

Which device turns a computer's digital data into signals that can travel over a telephone line?

Modem is short for modulator-demodulator, a name that lists its two jobs: reshaping data for the line on the way out, and turning the incoming signal back into data.

Which physicist, who proved electromagnetic waves exist, gives his name to the unit of frequency?

Heinrich Hertz saw no practical use for his discovery, reportedly calling it just an experiment that proved Maxwell right. He died at 36, before wireless telegraphy arrived.

Which component, invented in 1947 by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, replaced the vacuum tube?

Transistor amplifiers are smaller and need far less power than the tubes that once boosted long-distance calls. The three inventors shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Samuel Morse's first official telegraph message in 1844 ran from the US Capitol to which city?

Baltimore's Mount Clare railroad station received the message, which ran along about 700 chestnut poles to Morse's partner Alfred Vail.

Which American telephone monopoly was broken up in 1984 into seven independent regional companies?

AT&T gave up its local operating companies to settle a US antitrust lawsuit, but kept its long-distance service and its equipment maker, Western Electric.

Which orbit, about 35,786 km above the equator, lets a home satellite dish stay pointed at one spot?

Geostationary satellites circle once per sidereal day, in step with Earth's rotation, so ground stations need no moving antennas to follow them.

Which science fiction author proposed communication satellites in a 1945 Wireless World article?

Arthur C. Clarke, later the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, modestly insisted that the idea of such an orbit was at least twenty years older than his paper.

Which satellite internet constellation did SpaceX begin launching in 2019, sixty craft at a time?

Starlink's first operational batch of 60 satellites went up together on a single Falcon 9 rocket in May 2019, a year after two test craft.

Which wireless networking technology is based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards?

Wi-Fi is a name coined in 1999 by brand consultants, who were hired to find something catchier than the engineers' label, IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence.

Which metal, drawn into twisted pairs of wire, carried landline telephone calls for over a century?

Copper pairs are twisted because the twist cancels electrical interference and crosstalk from neighbouring lines, an idea patented in 1881.

Which internet calling service, launched in 2003 with four Estonian developers, was retired in 2025?

Skype cut the cost of calls by borrowing the peer-to-peer approach of the file-sharing program Kazaa. Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for it in 2011.

Which mathematician founded information theory in 1948 with A Mathematical Theory of Communication?

Claude Shannon formally introduced the term 'bit' for a unit of information. Away from the blackboard he built juggling machines and took up unicycling.

Which godfather of broadband won a 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for sending light through glass?

Charles Kao showed in 1966 that impurities, not glass itself, were soaking up the light, so purer glass could carry signals over long distances.

Which Swiss city is home to the International Telecommunication Union, the oldest UN agency?

Geneva houses a body set up in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union, eighty years before the United Nations, to connect the telegraph networks of different countries.

Which US agency, established in 1934, regulates radio, television, wire, satellite and cable?

FCC commissioners took over from the Federal Radio Commission under a law whose stated aim was rapid, efficient wire and radio service for all the people of the United States.

Which letter, given the shortest signal in International Morse code, is sent as a single dot?

E got the shortest code because it is the most common letter in English. The scheme gave the briefest signals to the letters operators would send most often.

Which office technology dates back to an 1843 patent by Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain?

Fax machine history starts with Bain's Electric Printing Telegraph, and by 1846 he could reproduce graphic signs over a wire in the laboratory.

Which smartphone brand from Canada's Research In Motion popularised the QWERTY keyboard on phones?

BlackBerry was picked from about 40 candidate names because the tiny keys looked like the drupelets that make up the fruit.

Which picture characters were popularised by a 176-symbol set Shigetaka Kurita designed in 1999?

Emoji from Kurita's original set, each drawn in a single colour, are now displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Which Asian country launched the world's first commercial cellular network in 1979, in its capital?

Japan's network was run by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and at first covered only Tokyo. Sweden followed in 1981 and the United States in 1983.

Which digital mobile standard, drawn up by a European committee, first went live in Finland in 1991?

GSM first stood for Groupe Spécial Mobile, the committee that drew it up, and the letters were later reread as Global System for Mobile Communications.

Which Brunel-designed steamship laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866?

SS Great Eastern was by far the largest ship ever built at her 1858 launch, meant to carry 4,000 passengers to Australia without refuelling, before she was repurposed for cable work.

Which Kansas City undertaker invented the automatic telephone exchange to cut out the human operator?

Almon Strowger, in a commonly told story, believed a rival's wife was working the local switchboard and steering his customers' calls to her husband's funeral business.

Which American engineer, who fought Lee de Forest and David Sarnoff in court, developed FM radio?

Edwin Armstrong also devised the superheterodyne receiver. His FM system took on the static from thunderstorms and electrical equipment that had bedevilled AM radio from the start.

Which satellite phone network covers all of Earth, poles included, with 66 active satellites?

Iridium is named after element 77, the number of satellites first thought necessary. Better orbit planning cut the working fleet to 66, but the name stayed.

Which news agency's founder used homing pigeons in 1850 to link Brussels and Aachen?

Reuters grew out of that prototype service. From 1851 its founder switched to the electric telegraph, and the building in Aachen is still known as Reuters House.

The Moscow–Washington hotline, the 'red telephone' of legend, first used which equipment in 1963?

Teletype machines carried the leaders' messages as written text. Despite the legend, the link was never a telephone line and no red phones were ever used.

The ceremonial first US transcontinental phone call in 1915 linked New York with which city?

San Francisco was celebrating the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, and the call was timed to match. The line itself had been finished and voice-tested the previous summer.

Which three-digit telephone prefix do American films and TV shows use for fictitious numbers?

555 numbers keep curious viewers and practical jokers from ringing real people. Phone companies were urging film and television producers to use the prefix by the 1960s.

Which computer company's Simon Personal Communicator of 1994 is often called the first smartphone?

IBM's Simon paired a cellular phone with a stylus-driven touchscreen, a calendar, an address book and email, thirteen years before the iPhone.

Which Chinese telecom equipment maker was founded in Shenzhen in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei?

Huawei's founder had been a deputy director in the People's Liberation Army engineering corps, and the firm won an early contract to build the army's first national telecom network.