Development of the modern instrument
The telephone instrument continued to evolve over time, as can be illustrated by the succession of American instruments described below. The concept of mounting both the transmitter and the receiver in the same handle appeared in 1878 in instruments designed for use by telephone operators in a New York City exchange. The earliest telephone instrument to see common use was introduced by Charles Williams, Jr., in 1882. Designed for wall mounting, this instrument consisted of a ringer, a hand-cranked magneto (for generating a ringing voltage in a distant instrument), a hand receiver, a switch hook, and a transmitter. Various versions of this telephone instrument remained in use throughout the United States as late as the 1950s. As is noted in the section Switching, the telephone dial originated with automatic telephone switching systems in 1896.
Desk instruments were first constructed in 1897. Patterned after the wall-mounted telephone, they usually consisted of a separate receiver and transmitter. In 1927, however, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) introduced the E1A handset, which employed a combined transmitter-receiver arrangement. The ringer and much of the telephone electronics remained in a separate box, on which the transmitter-receiver handle was cradled when not in use. The first telephone to incorporate all the components of the station apparatus into one instrument was the so-called combined set of 1937. Some 25 million of these instruments were produced until they were superseded by a new design in 1949. The 1949 telephone was totally new, incorporating significant improvements in audio quality, mechanical design, and physical construction. Push-button versions of this set became available in 1963.
Modern telephone instruments are largely electronic. Wire coils that performed multiple functions in older sets have been replaced by integrated circuits that are powered by the line voltage. Mechanical bell ringers have given way to electronic ringers. The carbon transmitter dating from Edison’s time has been replaced by electret microphones, in which sound waves cause a thin, metal-coated plastic diaphragm to vibrate, producing variations in an electric field across a tiny air gap between the diaphragm and an electrode. The telephone dial has given way to the keypad, which can usually be switched to generate either pulses similar to those of the dial mechanism or dual-tone signals as in AT&T’s Touch-Tone system. Finally, a number of other features have become available on the telephone instrument, including last-number recall and speed-dialing of multiple telephone numbers.
Cordless telephones
Cordless telephones are devices that take the place of a telephone instrument within a home or office and permit very limited mobility—up to 100 metres (330 feet). Because they communicate with a base unit that is plugged directly into an existing telephone jack, they essentially serve as a wireless extension to existing home or office wiring. The first cordless phones employed analog modulation methods and operated over a pair of frequencies, 1.7 megahertz and 49 megahertz. Beginning in the 1980s, cordless phones operated over a pair of frequencies in the 46- and 49-megahertz bands, and in the late 1990s phones operating in the 902–928-megahertz band began to appear. These phones employed either analog modulation, digital modulation, or spread-spectrum modulation. Some digital cordless telephones now operate in the gigahertz region—for example, 5.8 gigahertz. Generally speaking, each successive generation of cordless phones has offered improved quality and range to the consumer.
Personal communication systems
In a number of countries throughout the world, a wireless service called the personal communication system (PCS) is available. In the broadest sense, PCS includes all forms of wireless communication that are interconnected with the public switched telephone network, including mobile telephone and aeronautical public correspondence systems, but the basic concept includes the following attributes: ubiquitous service to roving users, low subscriber terminal costs and service fees, and compact, lightweight, and unobtrusive personal portable units.
The first PCS to be implemented was the second-generation cordless telephony (CT-2) system, which entered service in the United Kingdom in 1991. The CT-2 system was designed at the outset to serve as a telepoint system. In telepoint systems, a user of a portable unit might originate telephone calls (but not receive them) by dialing a base station located within several hundred metres. The base unit was connected to the PSTN and operated as a public (pay) telephone, charging calls to the subscriber. Because of its limited coverage, the CT-2 system went out of service, giving way to the popular GSM digital cellular system (see mobile telephone).
Meanwhile, the European Conference on Posts and Telecommunications (CEPT) had begun work on another personal communication system, known as DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, formerly Digital European Cordless Telephone). The DECT system was designed initially to provide cordless telephone service for office environments, but its scope soon broadened to include campus-wide communications and telepoint services. By 1999 DECT had reached 50 percent of the European cordless market.
In Japan a PCS based loosely on the DECT concepts, the Personal Handy-Phone System (PHS), was introduced to the public in 1994. The PHS became popular throughout urban areas as an alternative to cellular systems. Supporting data traffic at 32 and 64 kilobits per second, it could perform as a high-speed wireless modem for access to the Internet.
In the United States in 1994–95 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sold a number of licenses in the 1.85–1.99-gigahertz region for use in PCS applications.
