Phone In This Quiz on Telecommunication History

The company that invented the first handheld cell phone is still a player in the tech world: Motorola. Company engineer Martin Cooper created the device and made the first phone call in 1973 while crossing a street in New York City. The technology combined some already existing functionality: the cellular networks that were used for two-way radio phones for the police and military, and mobile phones, which existed in cars and trains but couldn’t be removed.

In 1971, electrical engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email. He developed a program to send messages between different computers, called SNDMSG. Tomlinson was the first to use the @ symbol, to indicate that a sender or recipient was at a specific location. He said the first emails sent were “entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them,” but he guessed the first message was something close to QWERTYIOP.

The very first computer message was sent in 1969, via ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. It was sent by a UCLA student programmer named Charley Kline — and it didn’t quite go well. He attempted to send the word “login” to a Stanford Research Institute computer, but the entire system crashed halfway through the word. Only “lo” was sent, which became the first-ever instant message.

The speed of transmitting messages in Morse Code is measured in words per minute, or WPM. However, since different words vary greatly in length, the length of a standard word is represented by the word “Paris” (plus a space after it). That means for a Morse code message sent at 20 WPM message, the word "Paris" could be sent 20 times.

Most radio stations in the U.S. have a call sign that starts with either “K” or “W.” These acronyms date back to 1912 when an international conference assigned certain letters to different countries. The United States got “W,” “K,” “N,” and “A.” The call signs for radio and TV stations east of the Mississippi began with “W,” and those west of the Mississippi began with “K.” The letters “N” and “A” were used for military stations.

At the 1939 World's Fair in New York, the American public officially met the future of entertainment, as the television made its nationwide debut. Large television sets were on display, including one with a clear case to show how the machine worked. At the end of the exhibit, attendees could see themselves shown on TV.

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, originally suggested that "ahoy" be the standard greeting when answering the phone. Thomas Edison eventually triumphed with "hello," but Bell did inspire another common phrase: To “put someone on hold" comes from Bell handing his telephone to his assistant and saying, "Here, hold this."

Alexander Bain, a Scottish inventor and mechanic, created the first fax machine in 1843. The machine used a stylus on a pendulum to grab images from a metal surface, another pendulum to write the images down, and electric current to transmit the image. The fax machine was made by combining the technology of telegraph machines with the mechanism of a clock, which was used to synchronize the pendulums.

Pagers weren’t the most efficient form of communication — you had to press the “7” key on your Nokia four times just to get the letter "S." Users needed all the help they could get, so shorthand codes were often employed. Back in the 1990s when you wanted to send a sweet little message on your pager, you just typed out “143,” which stood for the number of letters in each word of the phrase “I love you.”

Inventor Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful phone call on March 10, 1876. It wasn’t exactly long distance — he called his assistant, Thomas Watson, from one room of his Boston house to another. The content of the historic call? “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.”