In March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell uttered these now famous words: "Mr. Watson, come here - I want to see you". That day marked the beginning of an extraordinary time in communication - the advent of the telephone! Since then there have been thousands of changes in our communication system, many of which I outlined in a previous column for "The Detroiter" entitled "Whatever Happened To Pink Slips?"
In that column I traced some communication systems starting with the rudimentary clanking of rocks by cave men to our modern technology with cell phones. More recently I discussed the TomTom GPS system for our car. Obviously there is no limit on where technology will take us!
Over the last couple of months we learned about Kindle, which is a device that displays books on a hand-held screen. No longer does one have to tote around large books - most any book you want to read can be downloaded on the Kindle, which resembles a laptop with about a ten-inch screen. By using Amazon.com, one can download over 400,000 book titles!
Then just this past week Apple announced something called iPad, which will be available in stores sometime in April. It's a multi touch tablet computer and evidently will be another success for this forward looking company. Just by way of background, Apple has 284 stores. Since 2001 over 250 million iPods have been sold, and in the last quarter of 2009 over 50 million people visited the Apple stores. Just today we were at the mall and while walking past the Apple store we noticed scores of people lined up just to learn about the iPad and of course to buy more iPods. A true success story!
That brings me back to my opening comments about Bell's invention - the telephone. I still remember making phone calls on my grandmother's crank phone in Mulberry, Kansas. A few turns of the handle and you were immediately connected with Flossie, the town's operator. Flossie would then hook you up with my grandfather at his feed store or any of the other folks in town.
A recent trip to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan reacquainted me again with my grandmother's phone with the crank. Along with that relic there were 53 other phones including rotary, touch-tone, pay phones, business phones, car phones, and cell phones.
And have you noticed that there are fewer and fewer pay phones in existence? Guess it's presumed that most everyone now has a cell phone. I know that several of our grandchildren have cell phones. Every now and then we receive a text message from one of them. Why they just can't call is a mystery to me! I'm not a text message aficionado!
Our communication technology is changing so fast that I could write a column every month about new phone introductions. Case in point is a product that my friend Ron Bauer just brought to my attention. He is a rep for ACN, a telecommunication company. His company has introduced a video phone wherein while you are talking on the phone you are actually viewing the person on the other end of the line on a TV screen that is part of the phone. Really neat! The phone costs $99 with a monthly fee of $29.99 for unlimited local and long distance use. The phone has been featured on Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice Show". If you want to be ahead of the communication curve you can contact Ron for more information at
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. I suspect if Graham Bell had one of Ron's phones, he wouldn't have to ask Watson to come in the room to see him - Watson would be on the screen. And for me, it would give me a chance to see the real Flossie in Mulberry, Kansas!
Now I have to answer a text message from my grandson Joel. How do you respond to "What's up?" when you are retired? So much going on here that text messaging him would wear out my fingers! Wonder if he knows how to answer a real phone call!
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