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An Icon of the Millennium

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VoicenData Bureau
New Update

Telephone is not only a part of our popular cinema, art, and songs, it is an essential part of everyday life, even in rural India.“We have the power in our hands now to make the first industrial revolution look small”, said John Chambers, the high flying CEO of Cisco, delivering a keynote address recently. For quite some time, Chambers and his company have been leading the challenge of data camp in the so-called battle between voice and data. Apparently they are

winning. 

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It is ironic. The foundation of this power play (that Chambers is referring to) was laid by a man, who more than anything else, was obsessed with voice, its storage, reproduction, and transmission. Yes, for Alexander Graham Bell, the father of modern communications, communications itself was, at best of secondary interest, and data, an alien word. Voice, or the speech, as he referred to it, was what he was obsessed with. 

This obsession, coupled with Bell’s dedication to his research, gave the world the telephone. It helped the world to think differently. People could now be closer to each other without actually being physically close–something that they had always craved for, right from the beginning of civilization. 

Before one is accused of exaggeration, just a statement of fact. The patent number 174,465 –considered by many as the most valuable patent issued in the history–awarded to Bell on 7 March 1876 by the US Patent Office, not only described the telephone but had also outlined the concept of telecommunication systems. It was the birth of a New World. 

However, then there were people who found telephone “hardly more than a toy”. They were the senior executives at Western Union, the then reigning leader of the communication business in the US. And they had to (naturally) reject a proposal by Bell’s partner, GG Hubbard, to pay $1,00,000 for the patent of this “toy”. But it was only a matter of time. A strong idea always withstands the test of time. Telephone was one such idea. By 1884, Bell had taken a controlling stake in Western Union. But that is a different story.

Today, telephone is an icon of our civilization. It is an indispensable part of our lives, our culture, and our collective psyche. In fact, it can well be called one of the greatest inventions of this “millennium”, the word used here to mean what it actually means–the thousand years from 1000 to 2000.

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