Voice was the focus of telecommunication for centuries, but now we live in a FaceTime world. How did we go from watching national broadcasts exclusively on giant, heavy, black-and-white televisions in our living rooms to 4K HDR video streaming in our pockets, practically anywhere in the world? In this episode, Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi continue the journey of telecommunication from the invention of photography to television to satellites to cell towers, and how they all contributed to the remarkable gadgets we carry around today. New episodes every Tuesday from March-June.
Keyboard and Quill is created and made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit for data professionals. Get 30% off registration.
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype
Link: claritype.com
Dr. Mara Mills (NYU)
Link: Website
Book: Crip Authorship: Disability as Method
Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude.
--
Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi
Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund
Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia
Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz
Voice was the focus of telecommunication for centuries, but now we live in a FaceTime world. How did we go from watching national broadcasts exclusively on giant, heavy, black-and-white televisions in our living rooms to 4K HDR video streaming in our pockets, practically anywhere in the world? In this episode, Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi continue the journey of telecommunication from the invention of photography to television to satellites to cell towers, and how they all contributed to the remarkable gadgets we carry around today. New episodes every Tuesday from March-June.
Keyboard and Quill is created and made possible by StarTree, hosts of the Real-Time Analytics Summit for data professionals. Get 30% off registration.
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Rachel Pedreschi and Claritype
Link: claritype.com
Dr. Mara Mills (NYU)
Link: Website
Book: Crip Authorship: Disability as Method
Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude.
--
Story by Tim Berglund and Rachel Pedreschi
Produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund
Edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia
Original music and sound by Jeff Kite, keyboardist for The Voidz
- Okay. All right.- Hi.- And then you're.(group laughing) One more time.(upbeat music) You're listening to-- Keyboard and Quill-- From StarTree.- Creators of the Real-Time Analytics Summit-- And podcast.- Hey, I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- In this episode, we're gonna continue exploring the history of telecommunications, which is really about how we can extend our voice, first across the room, then a field, then oceans, and how that leads to the digitally connected world we live in today.- We all know that a phone call is better than texting when you really need to communicate carefully. And likewise, a Zoom call or a FaceTime can be even better. There's a lot of information in a person's face that can really make a difference. So even by the early 20th century, figuring out how to send images telegraphically was a high priority.- Yes. Photography had been with us since 1839, since the very early days, experimental days of the telegraph. And by the time of the radio, around 1900, it was cheap enough to be available to middle-class hobbyists. Now, a guy named Daguerre, a French guy named Daguerre often gets the credit for the invention of photography. That process created a single positive image on a piece of metal. So that photographic process really hasn't survived to the present day. At the same time, there was this, just a little piece of trivia here, an English nobleman named William Henry Fox Talbot also inventing photography. And he invented a process that created negatives and made positive prints from them, which is the process that survives to this day. Again, there's this long history of unsuccessful ideas from the 1840s to the early 1900s for transmitting images. But the basic idea they came up with is you have to break down the image into little pieces, we call them pixels, and send those across the wire. 1914, you get this Englishman named Archibald Low. He demonstrates this completely digital device, that is, it's breaking down an image into pixels and sending the pixels across one at a time. He called it the "Televista." He used a matrix of little light detectors and this spinning wheel to digitize and send them over a wire and another spinning wheel on the other end to send them out to the display. And this was widely recognized as, like, the next big thing. It was a big deal. It's a splash when he demonstrated it. The Times of London, May 30th, 1914.- An inventor, Dr. A. M. Low, has discovered a means of transmitting visual images by wire. If all goes well with this invention, we shall soon be able, it seems, to see people at a distance.- The Daily Chronicle, May 29th, the day before.- Dr. Low gave a demonstration for the first time in public with a new apparatus that he has invented for seeing, he claims, by electricity, by which it is possible for persons using a telephone to see each other at the same time.- So to see people at a distance and using electricity are the keys here. Remember, telecom is about transcending the limits of our vision and hearing. We've figured out how to move electricity around, and we're in the process of figuring out how to move back and forth between electricity and radio waves. So this is a big win. Many early television ideas used spinning disks to digitize the image for transmission over a wire. This is yet another case of the early days of an idea being littered with failed attempts that was the best that we could manage or the most original that we can think of at the time. It was in 1928 that WRGB began the first television broadcast in Schenectady, New York. That saying, the history of TV is way too complex to cover. We invented a bunch of crappy ideas first and then settled into a useful black and white standard. Later, we added color. It was great.- So now we've got data.- The telegraph.- We've got voice.- Radio and telephone.- And video.- Television.- Yeah. Now, video phones were prototyped at various times. It was a science fair experiment. And we see this kind of tension between wired and wireless. It seems like it's always easier to make wired work. It tends to come first in the history of these things and go faster and have higher quality. But if we're talking about a subscriber service where every home or office has to have a connection, running all those wires is expensive. And we ran them for the phone network. That had been done by this point. And then you might do that and find that they don't work too good for a new kind of thing. And we're getting better and better at building radios and better at understanding high-frequency electronics throughout this time period, '20s, '30s, '40s. By the way, a lot of this work is happening at Bell Labs. So the phone company in the United States is a state-supported monopoly. There's one company that can provide phone service with regulated rates. And as a result, they were able to have earnings such that they could fund this amazing lab. All kinds of basic science and mathematics research happening out of Bell Labs in the middle of the 20th century. So around this time, getting better at electronics. Vacuum tubes are working great. People began to experiment with so-called "microwave transmissions."- Can you give me a quick definition of what a microwave is, rather than, like, microwave that I use for heating stuff up?- Yes. It's electromagnetic radiation, so a radio wave. Very broadly, you could say the frequencies from 300 megahertz to about 300 gigahertz, you could loosely call those microwaves. So they're fairly high-frequency radio waves. So yeah, these early antennas that, like, Marconi and these folks are using, they would broadcast a signal uniformly in all directions. The microwave stuff that people started working with, these were directional. You'd have like a dish and you'd point it in a direction. Now, World War II happens in this space. Radar is causing all kinds of advances in our understanding of antennas and microwave electronics. And this becomes a way of connecting these long-distance voice connections over distance. But you're at the point now, by the 1950s, where AT&T has built a series of point-to-point microwave relays that carry long distance traffic and TV broadcasts across the country. The cool thing here that's happening with microwaves is that because of their high frequency, and just kind of take my word for it here, you can cram a lot of information on them. So you can have a microwave link that has 240 voice calls at the same time. That's a number that comes up a lot. The bummer was that line of sight forced all the relay stations to be up on towers, and you had to have a lot of them connecting in a row to cover long distances. This is a cool thing, right? We've got this wireless technology. If only you could get them to go up over the curvature of the Earth somehow and not have to go through all these miles of atmosphere. Microwaves don't like the air. If only-- There was a way, something that you could send up into the stratosphere.- Or above.- Or above. I'm not exactly sure. But I think they're called satellites.(otherworldly music)- So actually, this idea of the communication satellite is credited to, and this was news to me, this was really cool, the sci-fi legend Arthur C. Clarke in 1945. He actually proposed putting a microwave relay in place in geosynchronous orbit, or at an orbit at a distance such that the satellite moves at the same rate as the Earth spins. So it would appear as you looked up, if you could see the satellite, that it would stay in the same place all day and night.- Good idea.- Yeah, and the first active relay satellite was designed and launched by AT&T in July of 1962. It relayed phone and television traffic. It was not geostationary, so the ground stations had to actively track it as it moved across the sky. But on July 23rd, it was the first TV broadcast across the Atlantic. It could only do this for about 30 minutes out of its 2.5-hour orbit. So you could watch, you know.- So just a little bit of TV.- Like a British sitcom.- Yeah. Again, you're making things work.- It only actually took two more years, until 1964, when we had the Syncom 3, which actually did achieve a proper geosynchronous orbit. So satellites were really good at relaying television signals. They were better than microwave towers for voice traffic. But, like so many things, there was still a problem. These geosynchronous orbits are about 23,000 miles above the Earth, and it takes a radio signal about an eighth of a second to travel one way. That means you have to wait a quarter of a second for your voice to get to the other side. Then they hear you, think, and respond, and it takes a quarter second for the response to get to you. The whole goal here is extend the range of our voices, but we weren't expecting to get an extra half second of delay in each back-and-forth conversation. And if you've ever had one of those awkward silences at a conversation, you know this could be very disconcerting. What's interesting is that for pictures, delay doesn't really matter. If you're seeing an image a quarter second later than it's happening somewhere across the world, it's kind of insubstantial.- Yeah, fine. Who cares?- In my lifetime, and I think yours, too,'cause we're of similar age, domestic long distance has always been terrestrial for this reason. But international long distance is not.- Yeah. And we didn't ever use satellites for the domestic stuff'cause it was so bad. And these days, yeah, we fixed it.- So maybe in this back and forth between wires and wireless, maybe we needed another shot at wires.- Exactly. But we're gonna need them to be a little better. After a short break, we'll untangle wired communication.(upbeat music)(upbeat music continues)- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- I'm Tim Berglund.- This is Keyboard and Quill. We're gonna keep going with our show on the history of telecommunication with wires.- Now, the idea that you could bend light through a tube of something, that goes back to about the 1840s. Physicists were showing that light could bend through a curved stream of water. You didn't have really good glass fibers for this purpose until 1953, and there wasn't really a way of switching a light source on and off in a way that worked, until 1961 when you've got lasers. That's the first transmission of a signal through a fiber using a laser, which was a brand-new technology. So the concept of fiber optics is on the map 1961. Now, lasers were still pretty big and bulky at that time, until the invention of semiconductor lasers in 1970, which led to laser pointers, which led to all manner of abuse of cats.- I don't think it's abusing cats. My cats love me playing laser pointer.- Do they like it? Okay. I'm not a cat person. I'm allergic to cats, in fact. I always assumed that they were frustrated by it.- I think any more frustrated than any toy that moves out of their way as soon as they get there.- Okay. Good. All right, well, I feel better about that. The first voice traffic sent through a fiber optic cable using a laser happens in 1977 in Long Beach, California. We're getting to kind of recent things. I mean, that's in my lifetime.- For sure. Mine too.- Yeah. But so much had to happen first. Fiber optics were a digital-only technology. These other things all started, voice, telephony, radio, all these things started as analog. Satellite switch phone calls up to this time were analog things. And fiber was really built out as a part of the telephone network. So hang on a second. When did voice become digital? Well, there were experiments with this in World War II of doing a thing called pulse code modulation, which is where you have a little device that just samples your voice a few thousand times a second and turns it into a numeric code. That didn't really go anywhere in World War II. There were new experiments in the early '60s, but electronics, the state of the art in electronics, really wouldn't let us do that well until some semiconductor innovations in the early '70s. And all of a sudden, PCM, pulse code modulation, is practical for telephony. So increasingly, voice traffic transmitted over trunk lines, those were the lines between exchanges, long-distance or medium-distance things, those are starting to become transmitted as digital signals. Now that you've got that digital traffic in the phone network, it's really ready for fiber optic cables. By 1980, AT&T starts building a nationwide fiber optic backbone that can run at 45 megabits per second, Rachel.- Ooh.- Right? Yeah. If that was your download speed on your cable internet, you'd call the provider and be upset with them. That was the connection between nodes in this network. It's quaint by contemporary standards.- I definitely have some friends whose wifi runs at about that level, and I keep telling them,"That's not right. That's not okay."- But at the time, it's amazing. Sprint comes into existence at this time.- Oh.- There's whole new regulatory changes allowing new long-distance companies to serve long-distance calls. And their whole value prop is all fiber, all digital network.- I didn't realize that's why Sprint existed.- Neither did I, but there you go. So the satellite stuff that was solving problems we were really excited about, fiber's competing with that. If you could stretch a fiber under the water, why would you use satellites anymore?- Well, we've talked a lot about wires stretched from Europe to the United States. We started with telegraph wires and then telephone wires. Then we just avoided it with satellites. So when did we get transatlantic fiber? I'm sure it's happening.- It has happened. It happened in 1988 by 2,000 copper, a pair of copper wires. You asked at one point, is that pair of copper wires still around? It is if you have a landline. Yeah. In telephony, people call that the local loop. And at this point, 25 years ago, by that time, those copper wires were pretty much just the local loop. Your landline connection to your central office. Everything else was fiber, with microwave systems being rapidly decommissioned at this point. And satellite is used for lots of things, but usually not voice,'cause that was a pain. It's gonna become a fiber world.- So I guess what I've missed in this is fiber just seemed to come out of nowhere.- Yeah.- Was it just because the copper wires weren't able to do these transatlantic calls? What was the use case that fiber-- Yeah, what's driving this crazy adoption? I think the answer is data rates. Because you had lasers driving them, the loss characteristics and noise characteristics of that signal through the fiber were so dang much better than what you could get through any wire that, for the same cost of digging a trench and laying a thing in it, you could just carry much more signal over that. And it was so compelling that everything else just got pushed out of the way.- So we're saying that this is going to help people have better quality of experience, and we're also going to allow companies to be able to push more and more people onto a single wire. There's more capacity and better quality.- Yeah, so for the fixed capital investment of digging the trench and laying the expensive fiber, I can push more subscriber traffic over that. It sounds better. It's digital. The noise is gonna be a much, much smaller problem. It's faster. We're not telling the story. Remember at the beginning we said we're just not gonna talk about computers here. By the '80s, you've got, increasingly, mainframes, mini computers. You've got PCs by the '80s, but the systems running the developed world are still mainframes at that point. Those computers want to exchange data over these networks. So with increasing just data traffic over this network, the fiber network is better equipped to do that. So in every way, when you're 10, 100X better at what you were doing before, it's just gonna push the other things out of the way.- So you can say that fiber is what ushered in the age of the internet.(uplifting music)- I really think that's true. Yeah. I think the kind of data that we move around, the technologies that came before fiber just would not have been possible. And nobody was really thinking the internet when they were building out fiber, but it was a nice thing that was in place that we used when the internet came around.- But I think wireless technology at the same time was also improving. After a short break, we'll pick up the mobile phone. But first, let's invest in our show's future.- At the tone, please record your message.(phone beeps)- Hi, this is Anya from Milpitas, California. Keyboard and Quill is made possible by StarTree, host of the Real-Time Analytics Summit, an annual conference that brings together professionals in the data space to discuss harnessing actionable insights from real-time data. Join us to learn, teach, connect, and have an amazing time with the best community in the user-facing real-time analytics world.- Register now at rtasummit.com.- I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- I'm Tim Berglund.- This is Keyboard and Quill. We're gonna keep going with our show on the history of telecommunications with mobile phones.- And this whole thing, like you say, talking about internet and all that, this is all going somewhere, and we should get there now.- Well, where do you feel that it's going?- I think it's going to mobile phones.- Right. Because we've had all these advances in wired technology, we need to have a similar advance in wireless technology.- Yes, we do.- So we didn't end in satellites. Telephones, though, were fundamentally wired from the start. You mentioned a local loop of two copper wires, which provides our landlines and connects us to a central office. That office would then provide a dial tone and interpret dialing instructions to switch your calls from one subscriber to another. But what happens if you wanted to talk on the phone when you weren't at home, maybe in your car, maybe just out and about, and you didn't wanna use a public phone, because maybe you didn't have a dime or a quarter, or just there just wasn't one?- Or you just didn't want to.- Just didn't want to.'Cause honestly, they were gross. Anyway, to use a telephone when you're out and about, that would require a radio link. And this was done starting in actually 1946.- That early?- That early. The mobile telephone surface was rolled out. It was 80 pounds of gear, often installed in a car.- I hope.- The calls were operator assisted, so there was no more than 32 channels across an entire metropolitan area. And the operator had to help figure out which channel to assign a call to. You can imagine the system not scaling particularly well.- Yes. Say I'm in Denver. There could be 32 calls, but you're making these people carry 80-pound bags around.- Yeah, how many people are willing to carry around 80-pound bags?- Right.- 32.- Apparently.- Anyway, this is a tricky problem to solve. You need a little device to talk to a central station somewhere, but you can't have it transmit with too much power or you're gonna fry your brain, and the battery would be too bulky.- Yeah, batteries were not very good.- You also need to figure out how to have more than 32 channels, or it's not gonna be very cost effective.- Right.- Remember how we were talking about microwave links and how they were directional with the satellites pointed, but lower frequencies were not? So we probably wanna use those lower frequencies to transmit wireless phone calls. But at those lower frequencies, we don't have as much room for separate channels.- Yeah, yeah, like I was talking about, when they went to microwaves, they could all of a sudden, here's 240 channels on this link,'cause it's a high frequency. And we're just asking everybody to take that on faith. Down here, we don't want the high frequencies. We don't have the room. So we're hosed.- But we don't because we have an answer called cells.(upbeat music) And we're not talking about biological cells or prison cells. We're talking about instead of one central station, spread a bunch of little radio stations all over a city and give the mobile radio phone the ability to hop from one cell station to another. And this was actually first launched in Tokyo in 1979. And it's actually still in use today. I don't know if you've ever had this situation where at the same place next to your best friend's house, your cell phone signal always drops out. That's you moving from one cell to another, and not well. Not saying that this happened from personal experience.- No, that doesn't sound like an oddly specific story at all.- No, not at all.- And there were a few advantages to this, right? Because of the cell system, you don't need the mobile device to transmit as much power,'cause its tower is gonna be closer. And batteries were terrible. That's a good thing. You can reuse spectrum between cells. You don't have just 32 channels for the whole city. You have 32 channels for this little, you know, two-mile radius or whatever.- If we wanna relate it to today's technology, this is 1G. This was first-generation technology.- Analog cellular telephony.- So you can think Steven Wright, his one-liner, 1G.- There you go. Sergeant Murtaugh in "Lethal Weapon," he's got a mobile phone. He's sitting on an overpass talking to the police psychologist, and it's this big case that he's carrying with this handset connected to it. That was the technology.- 1G. 2G, or second-generation, gear arrived in 1991, and it used all-digital voice transmission and much smaller devices. So instead of one of those big bricks, you had a smaller brick that you put to your ear.- Yeah. Could conceivably fit in your pocket.- And this is when cell phones started to become popular. I think my family had their first cell phone in 1992, actually. So my dad was an early adopter.- That is. In early '90s, that's an early adopter. I didn't get my first 2G phone until 1999.- Wow.- Yeah. Actually, I was curious. I looked up what mobile penetration in the US was in 1999. 34%.- Wow.- So I thought I was a late adopter, but no.- You weren't. I was actually living in England at that time, and we were using what we called WAP and to send web over the internet. And so I used to have a little demo phone, which slid open and had a screen, and I could go to a website in 1999 on my cell phone. And I thought that was pretty neat.- WAP in '99?- Yeah.- Oh, nice. I thought that was early 2000s. Okay, super cool.- But there wasn't a lot of data that we could transmit.- Other than the ridiculous WAP.- Yeah. I remember just sitting there trying to demo it, going,"I don't know, is it the server that's slow? Is it my phone that's slow? I have no idea. Probably all of it's slow." But what it did is it sparked people to want to access the web from their mobile devices. Access emails, calendars. All of that was much easier if you could do it on the web.- And yeah, from the advent of the internet, a story we're not really telling today, it's a thing that either we remember or it's a thing we live with, it seems like the focus on mobile wireless, like, okay, voice was a solved problem in the '90s. And from WAP, which was this miserably difficult attempt to use 2G technology to-- But it had a really cool phone.- You had a cool phone, and it was like this little, like, XML stuff. The actual stuff under the covers was, it wasn't the web. It was this adaptation of the web to these non-web things. The whole story from that point is more data faster, more of the internet in your pocket, is where we're going.- Right. And so data is still the problem today. So there's been this interplay between wired and wireless. It feels like that stabilized in something that we can all live with. We use wireless for the devices we carry. Our smartphones are wireless devices. And it's probably been a while since you've plugged your laptop into a wired ethernet connection, if you even ever have. But there's also an interplay between text, voice, and video. Those are progressively more difficult to build systems for. So that's the order that we built them out. But we still very much want all three. It turns out that the process of extending our voices farther and farther, which is what has motivated this whole telecommunications journey, isn't just about a literal voice. It's about what we want to say and how we wanna say it. Sometimes typed out words are best, whether it's a Slack or a text message, and whether the bubble is green or blue. Sometimes we need the immediacy and clarity of a spoken voice. And sometimes the intimacy of a face is necessary.- Where are we now, and where are we going? Mobile phone coverage is never good enough, and 5G data rates aren't usually as fast as they said they would be, but really most people have a smartphone. The latest data shows that about 66% of the world's population now uses a mobile phone of some stripe. But again, the latest figures indicating that smartphones are about 84% of those mobile devices. Like we said, this game is really about data now, and we'll always come up with reasons to want more of that. We don't need a whole lot more data for phone calls. You know, video calls work pretty well. But we're always gonna want more and more bandwidth to send more and more data. And there are always new problems. Like, what about rural and remote places that can't justify the capital investment of cellular infrastructure? There are satellite constellations like Starlink that are coming online that promise global coverage without the delay that plagued their geosynchronous big brothers. Will they rule the future? Will terrestrial cell towers go the way of the telegraph pole? You know, it seemed like a lot of new physics was being discovered in the 1800s at a rapid pace. All that low-hanging fruit being picked. And that gave way to the telecommunications technologies we have today. In a way, it seems like we've run out of physics. You know, there aren't any major new things to try. We're just refining the radios and the fiber lines we have now. Of course, that's usually what people say right before a big new paradigm arrives. Whatever happens, we'll keep projecting our voices and our faces further out, more immediately, more intimately. We want connection, and to the degree we can push aside the limits of space and time, we will.(uplifting music) Many thanks to Dr. Mara Mills from NYU. You could find links to her work in the show notes. Also, thank you to Coastal Kites for the music you heard in our interlude. It's available on Spotify and Apple Music.- Our show is produced by Peter Furia, Noelle Gallagher, and Tim Berglund. It was written by Tim Berglund-- And Rachel Pedreschi. It was edited by Noelle Gallagher and Peter Furia, and our amazing original music and sound design were created by Jeff Kite of The Voidz.- Keyboard and Quill is made possible by StarTree, host of the Real-Time Analytics Summit. Register now at rtasummit.com.- You can subscribe to Keyboard and Quill for free wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Please leave us a comment and a rating if you have a minute. And if you're a data professional, you should check out the Real-Time Analytics Podcast, which we launched in early 2023. New episodes every Monday. Link in the show notes. I'm Tim Berglund.- And I'm Rachel Pedreschi.- See you next time.(upbeat music)(upbeat music continues)