Talk:Timeline of the telephone

1. I think the link to trunks, unfortunately, links to something completely irrelevant to telephony.

2. It would be fun to extend the timeline some, if possible. I recall, although I have no exact dates anymore, that the first manual office using the "common battery" technique, that is the standard everywhere today, actually went into service in 1893, about a year after the first automatic exchange (which had to be, by its nature, common battery). Before that, telephones were powered by batteries in their bases.

The Bell system developed the panel switch in the 1920's, in part to avoid the Strowger patents. A significant innovation was a translation mechanism that allowed the switching mechanism (called a sender) to convert the last 4 digits of the phone number into a terminal point location in the switch matrix, thus allowing high traffic lines to be distributed (and redistributed) evenly within the office, without regard to the assigned number in order to provide better service. The culmination of this trend today is that essentially the full telephone number is translated, so that we have number portability, 800 numbers, etc. But few realize how early this started.

agreed. I have every intention of extending this up to the 1960's and the introduction of DTMF. but you have to start SOMEWHERE. Rick Boatright 23:14, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)