TelevisionA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWnetwork infi nitely more versatile than could have
been envisaged by the pioneers’.
Now telephone lines serve complex computer
data systems; documents are transmitted via
telephone – a scanning head records the light
and shade of the document as it turns on a rotat-
ing drum, translating intensity of tone into elec-
trical impulses for transmission over the wire to
be retranslated at the receiving end. Telephone
lines also carry telex services.
Microwave transmission techniques now
allow telephone calls through air, free of wires,
poles or underground conduits. Transmitting
from point to point, tall towers now beam as
many as 1,500 calls on a single carrier wave. Th e
London Post Offi ce Tower has a potential load
capacity of 150,000 telephone calls and capacity
to transmit 100 TV channels.
Mobile phones (see mobilization) can
be said to be the technological advance that,
more swiftly than any other, became a means
of communication on a mass scale, to the point
where their use began to be seen as a public
nuisance. Th eir increasing sophistication (and
the fact that they had become a style accessory)
created a new crime – mobile mugging, setting
the manufacturers the challenge of making the
devices inoperable except by the legitimate
owner. Today, in addition to phoning in the
traditional way, and text-messaging, users of
mobiles can tune into the internet as well as
radio and TV broadcasts, download music and
play computer games.
Belatedly, in the summer of 2002, justice was
done to the memory of the Florentine, Antonio
Meucci. Th e US House of Representatives voted
in favour of recognizing Meucci as the true
father of telecommunications, 113 years after his
death. See topic guides under media history;
media: technologies.
Telephone tapping See journalism: phone-
hacking; privacy.
Teletext Data in textual or graphic form trans-
mitted via the TV screen; the broadcasting
version of viewdata, which is telephone-linked.
In the UK, the BBC provides its CEEFAX
information service; the commercial television
equivalent was, until 1993, the Oracle service.
In the auction for such services, empowered
by the broadcasting act (UK), 1990, the
licence-winner was Teletext UK, a consortium
headed by Associated Newspapers and Philips,
the electronics company. Th e name of the new
service from 1993 is Teleview.
Television See television broadcasting. See
also topic guide under broadcasting.telegraphy. See also topic guide under
media history.
▶Brian Winston, Media, Technology and Society: A
History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (Rout-
ledge, 1998).
Telematics Term referring to the merging of tele-
communications and computers, brought about
by digitization. Th e 1s and 0s of the computer
are converted into tones relayed over telephone
lines and then reconverted at the other end of
the line by another computer. Thus informa-
tion can be held centrally, dispatched rapidly,
updated easily and networked internationally.
Th is trans-border data fl ow (TBDF) is enhanced
by satellites, the advantage of whose use is
that transmission costs do not rise in relation to
the distance being covered (as is the case with
microwaves and cables); as long, that is, as the
communication falls within the ‘footprint’ of the
same satellite.
Telephone In his early years a Scotsman, Alex-
ander Graham Bell (1857–1922), knew Charles
Wheatstone (1802–75), co-inventor of teleg-
raphy, and also Alexander John Ellis, an expert
in sound. Ellis showed Bell that the vibration of
a tuning fork could be infl uenced by an electric
current. He was able to produce sounds very
like those of a human voice. Bell, teaching deaf-
mutes in Boston, Massachusetts, experimented
on a musical telegraph (1872). He produced
artifi cial ‘ear-drums’ from sheets of metal and
linked these with electric wire.
In 1876 Bell succeeded in passing a vocal
message along a wire to an assistant in another
room. The first telephone switching system
was installed in New Haven, Connecticut, in
- However, while claiming credit for ‘his’
invention, and being acknowledged down the
years as the inventor of the telephone, Bell must
surrender the accolade to an unknown Italian,
Antonio Meucci (1808–89), who demonstrated
his ‘teletrofono’ in New York in 1860. Alas,
Meucci’s poverty (he could not aff ord the US
250 needed to patent his ‘talking telegraph’) and
his failure to secure fi nancial backing left the
way open for Bell – who had shared a laboratory
with Meucci and thus had access to his fi ndings
- to fi le a patent and pursue a lucrative deal with
Western Union.
A hundred years later, the US telephone
system, largely the monopoly of the company
Bell founded, was handling an average of over
240 million phone conversations a day and,
as Maurice Richards points out in Th e World
Communicates (Longman, 1972), the telephone
system had ‘developed into a communications