According to Elon Education (not Elon Musk), today's generation thinks nothing about picking up their phone wherever they are. The older generations can recall the impossible consideration of ever having a mobile phone, one not connected to a wall in the home.
The telephone has a long history, so I wanted to share 10 things you likely don't know.
- The busiest organization in the world is the Pentagon, which has 34,500 phone lines and receives 1 million daily calls. It received more than 1.5 million phone calls on the 50th anniversary of D-Day.
- The busiest telephone exchange was reportedly by BellSouth at the 1996 Olympic Games, during which 100 billion bits of information were transmitted per second.
- The annual revenue for the telephone industry is $210 billion, almost 8 times that of television and 23 times that of radio.
- Globally, about $1 trillion is spent annually on telecommunications products and services.
- One million threads of fiber-optic cable can fit in a 1/2" diameter space.
- The telephone is the most used piece of communication equipment in the world.
- China has the most cell phone users. Sweden has 229 phones (any type) for every 1,000 people.
- The longest phone cable is a submarine cable called Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG). It spans 16,800 miles from Japan to the United Kingdom and can carry 600,000 calls simultaneously.
- Connecting the first telephone line from New York to San Francisco took a year. Approximately 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles were needed to link the country's borders.
- The telephone has been one of the most profitable inventions in the history of the United States.
How many of these did you already know before reading this?
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