Connected: A Brief History of Global Telecommunications

Connected

A brief history of global telecommunications

JOHN TYSOE

AND

ALAN KNOTT-CRAIG

© John Tysoe and Alan Knott-Craig, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the copyright holders.

ISBN: 978-1-928257-75-2

e-ISBN: 978-1-928257-76-9

Published by Bookstorm (Pty) Ltd

PO Box 4532

Northcliff 2115

Johannesburg

South Africa

www.bookstorm.co.za

Edited by Tracey Hawthorne

Proofread by Sean Fraser

Cover design by mr design

Book design and typesetting by Triple M Design

Ebook by Liquid Type Publishing Services

Alan Knott-Craig can be contacted at alan@herotel.com, or visited at 156 Dorp Street, Stellenbosch, South Africa

www.bigalmanack.com

Contents

Introduction

1. Early history

2. The telecommunications industry in the USA up to 2000

3. The telecommunications industry in Europe up to 2000

4. The telecommunications industry in the rest of the world

5. The 21st century

Some major firsts in the mobile telecommunications industry

Some mobile industry subscriber milestones

What’s in a name?

Glossary and abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Yuvral Noah Hariri, author of the 2011 bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, argues that one of the single biggest differentiators between humans and all other mammals is our ability to tell stories. Storytelling is what enabled our dominance as a species.

If he’s right, that means that telecommunications technology is directly correlated to human endeavour. The better the technology, the further your story can spread, and the greater your audience.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the advent of a line-of-sight semaphore telegraph system by a Frenchman, Claude Chappe, coincided with Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. Using le systeme Chappe, messages sent from Paris could reach the outer fringes of the country in a matter of three or four hours; before, it had taken despatch riders on horseback a similar number of days.

In the 1840s and ,50s, electronic telegraphy – with stations set up along the new railway lines – began to take over. The telegraph was the first technology in history that allowed for a ‘story’ to be told over a distance beyond the reach of smoke signals, drums or signal poles.

South Africa’s apartheid government of the 1980s felt that access to telecommunications was access to power, which is why the state-owned fixed-line (‘landline’) operator was directed to limit phones in townships to no more than one per 100,000 people.

Many people take for granted unfettered communications but no one would have heard of the Tunisian vendor Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight in 2010 in protest against injustice in his country, if someone hadn’t taken a video and shared it via social media. No telecommunications = no sharing = no revolution.

The consequent Arab Spring – the series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Islamic world – is attributed to Egyptian revolutionaries organising rallies via social media, so much so that the state ordered mobile operators to shut down their networks. In response to the lack of information, many took to the streets to find out what was going on. In this way, the impact of the shutdown had the opposite effect to what the government had intended, as many people left their homes to acquire information and subsequently joined the protests. Take away a people’s connectivity and they’ll topple you.

Companies like Amazon and Takealot have revolutionised shopping, metaphorically bulldozing out of existence sometimes centuries-old bricks-and-mortar retailers. Uber and Lyft have revolutionised public transport, creating employment opportunities for tens of thousands of drivers who were historically locked out of mason-like industries. And here in South Africa new-age media company Daily Maverick used leaked email troves to expose corruption at the highest levels of government.

But with the good comes the bad. Child pornography is on the rise. Fake news is skewing election results. The dark web makes it easy to buy drugs and guns. Neo-nazis and neo-liberals are finding it easier to connect, with sometimes disastrous consequences.

For better or worse, however, telecommunications technology will continue to advance. Stories will be told faster and to more people. And if Hariri is right, that means humankind’s dominance of the planet will continue to grow.

If we’re to not abuse the dominance, we must know where we’re going. And to know where we’re going, we must first know where we came from. Hence, this book.

By understanding the history of telecommunications, perhaps we can better understand the future.

Alan Knott-Craig

Stellenbosch, South Africa

CHAPTER 1

Early history

‘Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.’

– Alexander Graham Bell, 10 March 1876

It’s been almost a century and a half since Scottish-born scientist Alexander Graham Bell said those immortal words on the first-ever phone call, to his assistant in the next room. Between then and now, the world has changed beyond recognition. And telecommunications, which has played a fundamental role in this change, has itself evolved into an industry that not so long ago was the sole preserve of science fiction.

Communication across time and distance dates back thousands of years, to the 6th century BCE, when the Persians used pigeons to carry messages across their vast empire. The Greeks invented the hydraulic telegraph, a semaphore system to send messages between Sicily and Carthage across the Mediterranean Sea, in about 350 BCE; and in China during the Han dynasty (200 BCE to 200 CE) a complex system of flag signals was developed, sending messages along the Great Wall and beyond.

It was in the late 18th century, however, that communications took a giant leap forward. In the 1790s French inventor Claude Chappe came up with the ‘tachygraph’ (‘fast writer’), an optical semaphore system that transmitted visual signals over a network of physical high points. In 1795 Spanish scientist Francisco Salva Campillo produced a device that transmitted electrical signals representing individual letters over a network of cables. In 1816 Englishman Francis Ronalds created the first working telegraph over a substantial distance, laying a 13-kilometre (8-mile) length of iron wire between wooden frames and sending pulses down it using electrostatic generators. And in 1832 Russian aristocrat Pavel Lvovitch Schilling created a machine that used a single needle and a system of codes to generate individual characters.

The achievement of producing the world’s first truly commercial telegraph network fell to two Englishmen, inventor William Fothergill Cooke and academic Charles Wheatstone, in 1837. Their telegraph used a combination of five needles, each with its own wire, which could point to some 20 separate characters arranged in a grid pattern on a board. In 1839 the Great Western Railway commissioned a Wheatstone and Cooke telegraph line running from Paddington Station in London out to West Drayton, a small town some 20 kilometres (13 miles) to the west.

This line is famous for having carried the first telegraph used to apprehend a criminal. In 1845 a certain John Tawell poisoned his mistress in her home outside Slough, before boarding a train to London. Tracked by a member of the local constabulary to the station, his destination and appearance were sent ahead to Paddington, where an arrest was made. Large crowds attended the subsequent hanging and the notoriety of the affair helped push the new technology firmly into the public consciousness.

A similar arrest was made 65 years later of an even more notorious criminal, using what was then cutting-edge technology. Having killed his wife and dismembered her body, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American homeopath living in London, booked passage on the SS Montrose bound for Quebec. His attempts to disguise himself didn’t fool the captain, who transmitted the following message by means of Mr Marconi’s new wireless telegraph back to the headquarters of the White Star Line in London: ‘Have strong suspicions that Crippen—London cellar murderer and accomplice—are amongst saloon passengers. Moustache taken off. Growing beard …’ Police were waiting for him in Quebec and, like Tawell’s, Crippen’s life came to an end at the end of a rope.

Across the Atlantic Ocean in the USA, portrait painter Samuel Morse was spurred into turning his attention to electrical communications after his wife died in 1825: he’d missed both her death and the funeral because at the time he was away from home completing a commission and the news had taken too long to