Today in 1894, New England Telephone and Telegraph installed the first battery-operated switchboard in Lexington, Massachusetts.
With what became to be known as the “common battery” (replacing the local battery attached to the telephone), the subscriber could signal the operator simply by lifting the receiver from its hook. With this development, according to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “the time occupied by an operator per call was reduced from 50.77 seconds to 16.63 seconds.” The 1911 definition of “Telephony” was “the art of reproducing sounds at a distance from their source, and a telephone is the instrument employed in sending or receiving such sounds.”
Also today, in 2007, Apple announced the iPhone.
Demonstrating the new pocket communicating computer at Macworld in San Francisco, Steve Jobs said:
Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything… today, we're introducing three revolutionary products... The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device…. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator…These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.
Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs:
The iPhone was immediately dubbed the “Jesus Phone” by bloggers. But Apple’s competitors emphasized that, at $500, it cost too much to be successful. “It’s the most expensive phone in the world,” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said in a CNBC interview. “And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.”
By the end of 2010, Apple has sold ninety million iPhones and it reaped more than half the total profits generated in the global cell phone market.