Push Button Phone Day

The start of a new era in the development of communications and wired communications was given in the Oval Office by JF Kennedy in April 1963 The US President dialed the number “1964” using the telephone buttons, thereby announcing the holding of a World Exhibition in New York with 37 participating countries The rotating dial of the device with letters in a circle became a thing of the past when the American Bell Systems released a push-button model with tone dialing for commercial use The new phone design was officially introduced by the company on November 18, 1963 to customers from the cities of Carnegie and Greensburg, located in Pennsylvania This date marks the celebration of Push-button Telephone Day An alternative to the classical model emerged in the 1880s simultaneously with the advent of a device with a rotating dial However, rotary-dial telephones, patented by Kansas businessman Almon Brown Stouger, became popular In 1896, this funeral home owner invented a machine with a rotating dial to spite his business rival His wife worked as a telephone operator, and in order to make conversations more confidential and retain clients, Strowger came up with a device that in everyday life was called “a telephone without young ladies and curses” In the USSR, a desktop device with a disk was first installed in the Kremlin The closed system of government and party communications was nicknamed the turntable An automatic telephone exchange, ATS, was created by order of Lenin because the leader of the world proletariat was interested in technical innovations The apparatus of the party nomenklatura, which was considered very prestigious to have, was decorated with the state coat of arms ATS-1 and ATS-2 were used only by the Kremlin elite, and ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union continued to communicate with other subscribers through telephone operators for a long time This type of government communication has continued to this day One of the devices on the desk of the President of the Russian Federation is a rotary telephone Bell Systems, from its electrical engineering department that became a corporation in the late 19th century, also includes Bell Laboratories, the company that launched the first mobile service in the United States and developed the operating principle of cellular communications in 1947 The telecommunications device was produced by Motorola The first push-button mobile phone appeared on the market in 1989 In the same year, Bell Labs implemented full-duplex communication, automatic dialing and search for a free radio channel in 3 frequency bands For a long time the company did not want to give up its monopoly and income from the sale of landline push-button telephones All US residents rented even heavy disk devices from Western Electric, a division of the corporation, paying both for calls and for using the devices Without the company's permission, the subscriber had no right to connect anything to the network Therefore, until the end of the 1970s Americans continued to use disk drives the old fashioned way By 1983, after the demonopolization of Bell Systems production, a mass of cheap push-button devices appeared on the US market, which became available to most citizens of the country Today, despite the development of the Internet and cellular communications, landline telephones with touch-tone dialing are still used at home, in offices and in production Connoisseurs of these reliable, time-tested devices with buttons instead of a rotary dialer celebrate November 18th as Push Button Phone Day