#historic-developments #createdbyme #conflict
- By end of 19th century, ‘networks’ weren’t a novel idea
- Connections between businesses to central offices
- Bell first sells everything in pairs
- Reframes vision
- Selling telephone companies in different cities, ‘heroic men on the telephone’
- First Bell company founded 1875
- First telephone exchagne operated by Western Union’s telephone subsidery
- First woman central office operator: 1878, Emma Nutt
- Idea of assigning unique numbers to subscribers suggested in 1879
- Why are we doing this with a human, when we could use a computer?4
- Social division in workforce
- Bell: “Women don’t get drunk at work, therefore better”
- Strowger automatic exchange - 1892
- Man who designed was an undertaker
- Wife of competing undertaker worked in telephone exchange
- Shifting work off employee onto customer
- People needed time to learn numbers, took time for it to take off
- Much of the info learned is US based - What’s the situation in Canada/elsewhere?
- Subject to interference from other electrical sources - trolleys, telegraph wires, thunderstorms
- ‘National Bell’ becomes ‘American Bell
- Hubbard and Bell are our
- Theodore Vail remains
- Agreement with Western Union still in force
- Patents on telephones are about to expire, Vail sees this and aims for long distance phone calls despite breaking agreement
- 1884 American Bell establishes long distance line between NY and Boston
- Creates subsidary company to do this, American Telegraph & Telephone Company
- Establishes lab to improve long distance telephony
- Loading coils: Repeater that would take a weak signal, shoot it out at stronger force
- 1888 All court battles around the original patents are won by Bell
- Bell is making lots of money despite depression in rest of economy
- Too bad patents just won were about to expire
- Independents appear; Bell fights them with both legitimate and spurious court cases
- Cut rates ridiculously where there is competition
- Modern day example: Amazon destroying book stores
- Electric fence invention: dividing up American and Canadian west
- Top wire can be insulated, turns into telephone line
- Costs to subscribe
- Long distance telephony was central to Bell’s plan to survive expiration of its patents
- Bell was directing customers to use telegraph services that it owned/had major stake in
- Antitrust legislation, populist politicians, interstate commerce commission, AT&T in the crosshairs
- Claude Shannon
- Using mice in mazes
- Could power electricity, and it could do logical truth test
- At Bell Labs, comes up with Information theory
- Redundancy is key to understanding language
- Took idea to logical conclusion, developed way to think about a messahe as being composed of two things:
- Info is measuring redundancy of content, or how ‘surprising’ it is
- Combine info theory with logical circuits = 20th century
- Model K Adder
- Wiring together different telephone pieces
- Incunabula:
- Lasts until mid 50s
- Each computer has its own design/way of representing info
- Idea of what a digital computer should look like was closed down quickly by John Newman
- Perceptron is invented: circuit that reps visual input