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)

I think there is a problema in this page. At the 1995 entry it says "Girls (expletive) every boy..." I tried to correct this by myself but I could not. Check it out.

It wouldn't be bad if this page was less US-centric. Zocky 09:05, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I was about to make the same comment myself. Things like "caller ID implemented nationwide" are very jarring. Dmharvey Talk 7 July 2005 22:42 (UTC)

Earliest phone is actually over 1200 years old

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ideas-innovations/Theres-a-1200-year-old-Phone-in-the-Smithsonian-Collections-231152081.html#.UqeBp_EoRXg.twitter 98.90.77.113 (talk) 16:56, 14 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

False claims on a Siemens website

It is sad to see that Siemens places wrong claims about the first commercial phone exchange on their website.

The correct date (November 12 1877) was taken from the Book "Die neuesten Erfindungen unserer Zeit" (1882) that I own and scanned in, see: http://cdrecord.org/private/tel.html

The false claims on the Siemens website (I removed the link) have been written recently by an anonymous person - they are of course unreliable. Note that the Siemens Website claims 1881 for the first the first phone exchange system in Germany, but in mid October 1880 there have already been 1126 phone exchange places in Germany. So we have a verified number of 1126 phone exchange systems in Germany compared to an unproven claim of 1 on the Siemens website. Note that to the end of 1878 (one year after the first commercial phone exchange system went online in Germany, there have already been 278 phone exchange systems in Germany.

So if someone likes to "correct" claims, it seems to be a good idea to first read the original citation and to understand it's reliability. Schily (talk) 11:24, 10 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, the problem is a poorly designed website. Your habit of calling everyone a liar doesn't help the discussion (and is deducted from your credibility). The parent page for the suggested link contains the information relevant to this discussion,

http://www.siemens.com/history/en/news_archive_downloads/news_archive.htm
click on "Innovations"
scroll down to the lead-in paragraph for the suggested link, which shows this paragraph:

1881 – First public telephone exchange in Germany
In the fall of 1877, Heinrich von Stephan initiates the first telephone experiments in Germany. Excited by the idea of being able to communicate in real-time, Stephan, then the General Postal Director of the German Empire, commissions Werner von Siemens to refine the telephone system invented by American Alexander Graham Bell. In November of the same year, Stephan authorizes the opening of the first telegraph office with telephone service in Friedrichsberg near Berlin (Berlin-Lichtenberg). The first exchange dedicated solely to telephone calls would follow less than four years later.

Notably absent from both parts of Siemens's page is any claim to "first in the world". Rather, the mentions of "first" are qualified in scope. Going further, I OCR'd your copy of tel.gif, and translated that -- and don't see any mention of "first in the world". Perhaps you've done as you did several times earlier this year, and cited information which you "knew" from some unpublished source. As it is, your source fails verification. TEDickey (talk) 00:38, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Let me correct your claims:

I did not call someone a liar
You just did...

Back to the Siemens Website: it contains unverified claims and has been written by an anonymous person.

The Siemens website claims the first public phone exchange in Germany to be set up in 1881, but this is not correct. It may be just a typo as it now (I know this website since more than a year and I cannot remember to see the year 1877 then) mentions later in the text the year 1877. And BTW: the phone exchange in "Friedrichsberg bei Berlin" (now called "Bezirk Lichtenberg von Berlin" as this district became part of Berlin when Groß-Berlin was founded in 1920 to get enough taxes to be able to pay social security benefits again) was not the first phone exchange in the world, but the first commercial phone exchange in the world. Nobody claims that there have been no previous non-commercial experiments, but the fact that the invention from Bell did not include a ringer made it impossible to be operated commercially before Siemens added his invention. The important fact that Siemens introduced a pipe as a device to create a sound that was loud enough for signalling was the important last invention to make the telephone usable for commercial traffic. If you still believe that this is not enough to prove the first commercial phone exchange, you should know that there have been TV broadcasts on the 100th and 125th anniversary that confirm my statement and if you look at the WP texts, you will see that all text that mentions earlier activity calls it experimental.

This is not the only place in WP where you act in a similar way and you do this with many people - not only with me. So it seems that you have a problematic relation to reliable sources and you could do people a favor and you would prevent a lot of longer discussions if you decided to kindly ask when you don't understand something instead of just reverting correct text. BTW: if you have been able to OCR the text in the gif (I was unable to get useful output), please send it to me. The fracture letters are hard to read for most younger people and it would help to have the part of the book available as text. 11:44, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

hmm - I see that you're back to calling me a liar. Looking forward to seeing you provide verifiable sources. So far - none. TEDickey (talk) 01:37, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]