Telecommunications Fun Facts

1900 - First coin telephone installed.
1951 - First long distance phone call without directory assistance.
1968 - First 911 system was introduced in the United States.
1971 - First commercially viable answering machine.
1985 - Cellular car phones introduced.
1988 - Auto-Dialing phone cards introduced.
1993 - The White House goes online.
Alexander Graham Bell originally wanted the greeting for the telephone to be "Ahoy" but Thomas Edison voted for "Hello," a word he coined in 1877.
The original name of the telephone was the harmonic telegraph.
It took a year to connect the first line from New York to San Francisco. 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles were needed to link the country.
The annual revenue for the telephone industry is $210 billion, almost 8 times that of
television and 23 times the revenue of radio.
Cellular phone service has accounted for a third of the telephone industry's growth for the last four years.
The US telephone wireless and directory market is expected to reach $211 billion by the year 2001.
Globally, about $1 trillion is spent annually on telecommunications products and services.
One million threads of fiber optic cable can fit in a tube 1/2" in diameter.
In 1999, new fiber was being installed at a rate of 2800 miles or 4500 kilometers per hour! (Source: Address by C. Michael Armstrong, Chairman & CEO, AT&T at Telecom '99 Geneva, Switerland)
The telephone is the most used piece of communication equipment in the world.
The busiest organization in the world is the Pentagon, which has 34,500 lines and gets 1 million calls a day. It received over 1.5 million phone calls on The 50th Anniversary of D-Day.
The busiest telephone exchange was by BellSouth at the 1996 Olympic Games, where 100 billion bits of information were transmitted per second.
Sweden is the country with the greatest penetration of telephones. It has 229 phones for every 1,000 people.
The longest phone cable is a submarine cable called FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe). It spans 16,800 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom and can carry 600,000 calls at a time.
The telephone is the most profitable invention in US history.

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