Telephone booths have disappeared after more than a century of existence. They are no longer a universal and essential service according to Spanish law and, town by town, they have been dismantled. Its withdrawal represents the farewell to a technology that marked an era.
Antonio Mercero turned a phone booth into the smallest set in movie history for a horror movie. The cabin it received an Emmy for best fiction program in 1973 and was a veiled symbol of the suffocating reality of Franco’s Spain. Booths and landlines have starred in fictions throughout the planet, and have formed part of the daily life of every human being.
Between 2000 and 2020, a total of 750,000 landline telephone lines were canceled in Spain, while 800 mobile telephone lines were registered every day. Its end deserves a review of its history.
A gangster movie beginning
In 2022 they were fulfilled hundred years of death of alexander graham bell, inventor of the telephone, the technology that made him rich.
Graham Bell had to deal with a whole series of litigation and accusations Regarding the invention of the telephone by the Italian inventor Antonio Meucci. Although the invention was initially awarded to Alexander Graham Bell, who kept it for more than a century, it was finally awarded to Antonio Meucci, who in 1854 had made a first prototype of a telephone, which he coined as a teletrophone, and which connected his bedroom , where his wife was convalescing, and his office, located in his home.
What Graham Bell did do was register the patent of the invention of the telephone in 1876, after appropriating a copy of Meucci’s original telephone plans, in an allegedly less than noble manner. In said patent the telephone was not described, but only mentioned.
Bell began to build an empire that would survive to this day based on that patent. The litigation between the two was so cumbersome that the company founded by Graham Bell, Bell Telephone Companycame to bribe Meucci’s lawyer, dying without the glory of the invention.
It was not until 2002 when the Official Gazette of the United States House of Representatives recognized that it was Antonio Meucci who invented the telephone instead of Alexander Graham Bell. A late but fair victory.
Who do I put him with? The beginnings of telephony
The telephone in his original idea, just as Meucci invented it, connected two intercoms without the possibility of changing interlocutors.
We all have in mind, from having seen in many movies, the telephone operators, typically women, who were in charge of connecting the cables of the switchboard in the correct position that would allow two specific people, located on both sides of the line, to communicate. The number of lines was limited and the telephone operators were in charge of prioritizing some calls and postponing others. A few years passed after the invention of the telephone until the company was founded in Spain. National Telephone Company of Spain (CTNE) in 1924.
The first telephone call in Spanish territory It was done much earlier, in 1877, in Cubawhich at that time was still Spanish territory, and was carried out between a fire station and the home of its fire chief.
If we stick to the private use of the telephone, the first private telephone line in Spain belonged to the landowner Rodrigo Sanchez Arjonawho in 1880 acquired a couple of telephones from the Bell company and installed them in his domain in Fregenal de la Sierra (Badajoz), connecting two buildings he owned 8 km apart.
From the cable to the waves
Bill Gates, the Microsoft tycoon, already predicted in 2007 that the days of the landline as we knew it were numbered. And he was not wrong. A phone It is an electro-acoustic transducer, that is, it transforms sound into electrical energy and vice versa. The way in which the signal travels from the sender to the receiver differs according to the type of telephony.
In it landline, the signal travels through electrical cables and in the mobile phone it travels through the air in the form of electromagnetic waves. In fact, we are constantly traversed by a multitude of electromagnetic waves that we are unable to see. However, long-distance wireless communication within the reach of ordinary citizens took almost a century to appear after the invention of the telephone. The first wireless call was made in 1973 by Martin Cooper, a Motorola company engineer, in New York City.
If Meucci and Bell raised their heads
50 years have passed since that first wireless call made with a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the size of a shoe and weighing almost a kilogram. Today, the mobile phone has replaced and joined a large number of instruments and applications such as a camera, video camera, GPS, radio, video and music player, alarm clock, compass, video game machine, etc. It is possible to make video calls in just a moment and connect with someone who is on the opposite side of the planet, send files and messages almost instantly and access any information from almost anywhere on the globe through Internet.
We do not know what the future of technology will bring us, but what is almost certain is that the landline telephone will not return to our lives, although it persists in the memory of many of us and evokes so many beautiful memories.
Francisco Jose Torcal Milla, Associate Professor. Department of Applied Physics. Center: EINA. Institute: I3A, Zaragoza’s University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.
