1.
Industrial Revolution
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The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and most of the important technological innovations were British, aided by these legal and cultural foundations, an entrepreneurial spirit and consumer revolution drove industrialisation in Britain, which would be emulated in countries around the world. A change in marrying patterns to getting married later made able to accumulate more human capital during their youth. The Industrial Revolution marks a turning point in history, almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. In particular, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth, mechanised textile production spread from Great Britain to continental Europe in the early 19th century, with important centres of textiles, iron and coal emerging in Belgium, and later in France. Since then industrialisation has spread throughout much of the world, the precise start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still debated among historians, as is the pace of economic and social changes. Economic historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in the history of humanity since the domestication of animals and plants. The term Industrial Revolution applied to change was becoming more common by the late 1830s. Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 spoke of an industrial revolution, however, although Engels wrote in the 1840s, his book was not translated into English until the late 1800s, and his expression did not enter everyday language until then. Credit for popularising the term may be given to Arnold Toynbee, some historians, such as John Clapham and Nicholas Crafts, have argued that the economic and social changes occurred gradually and the term revolution is a misnomer. This is still a subject of debate among some historians, the commencement of the Industrial Revolution is closely linked to a small number of innovations, beginning in the second half of the 18th century. By the 1830s the following gains had been made in important technologies, Textiles – mechanised cotton spinning powered by steam or water greatly increased the output of a worker, the power loom increased the output of a worker by a factor of over 40. The cotton gin increased productivity of removing seed from cotton by a factor of 50, large gains in productivity also occurred in spinning and weaving of wool and linen, but they were not as great as in cotton. Steam power – the efficiency of steam engines increased so that they used between one-fifth and one-tenth as much fuel, the adaptation of stationary steam engines to rotary motion made them suitable for industrial uses. The high pressure engine had a power to weight ratio. Steam power underwent an expansion after 1800. Iron making – the substitution of coke for charcoal greatly lowered the fuel cost for pig iron, using coke also allowed larger blast furnaces, resulting in economies of scale. The cast iron blowing cylinder was first used in 1760 and it was later improved by making it double acting, which allowed higher furnace temperatures
2.
Robotics
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Robotics is the interdisciplinary branch of engineering and science that includes mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and others. Robotics deals with the design, construction, operation, and use of robots, as well as systems for their control, sensory feedback. These technologies are used to develop machines that can substitute for humans, Robots can be used in any situation and for any purpose, but today many are used in dangerous environments, manufacturing processes, or where humans cannot survive. Robots can take on any form but some are made to resemble humans in appearance and this is said to help in the acceptance of a robot in certain replicative behaviors usually performed by people. Such robots attempt to replicate walking, lifting, speech, cognition, many of todays robots are inspired by nature, contributing to the field of bio-inspired robotics. Throughout history, it has been assumed that robots will one day be able to mimic human behavior. Many robots are built to do jobs that are hazardous to people such as defusing bombs, finding survivors in unstable ruins, Robotics is also used in STEM as a teaching aid. The word robotics was derived from the robot, which was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R. U. R. which was published in 1920. The word robot comes from the Slavic word robota, which means labour, the play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots, creatures who can be mistaken for humans – very similar to the modern ideas of androids. Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word and he wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother Josef Čapek as its actual originator. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware that he was coining the term, since the science and technology of electrical devices is electronics, he assumed robotics already referred to the science and technology of robots. In some of Asimovs other works, he states that the first use of the word robotics was in his short story Runaround, however, the original publication of Liar. Predates that of Runaround by ten months, so the former is generally cited as the words origin, in 1942, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov created his Three Laws of Robotics. In 1948, Norbert Wiener formulated the principles of cybernetics, the basis of practical robotics, fully autonomous only appeared in the second half of the 20th century. The first digitally operated and programmable robot, the Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine, commercial and industrial robots are widespread today and used to perform jobs more cheaply, more accurately and more reliably, than humans. They are also employed in jobs which are too dirty, dangerous. For example, a designed to travel across heavy dirt or mud
3.
Nanotechnology
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Nanotechnology is manipulation of matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale. It is therefore common to see the plural form nanotechnologies as well as nanoscale technologies to refer to the range of research. Because of the variety of applications, governments have invested billions of dollars in nanotechnology research. Until 2012, through its National Nanotechnology Initiative, the USA has invested 3.7 billion dollars, scientists currently debate the future implications of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology may be able to create new materials and devices with a vast range of applications, such as in nanomedicine, nanoelectronics, biomaterials energy production. These concerns have led to a debate among advocacy groups and governments on whether regulation of nanotechnology is warranted. The term nano-technology was first used by Norio Taniguchi in 1974, also in 1986, Drexler co-founded The Foresight Institute to help increase public awareness and understanding of nanotechnology concepts and implications. In the 1980s, two major breakthroughs sparked the growth of nanotechnology in modern era, the microscopes developers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Binnig, Quate and Gerber also invented the atomic force microscope that year. Second, Fullerenes were discovered in 1985 by Harry Kroto, Richard Smalley, and Robert Curl, in the early 2000s, the field garnered increased scientific, political, and commercial attention that led to both controversy and progress. Controversies emerged regarding the definitions and potential implications of nanotechnologies, exemplified by the Royal Societys report on nanotechnology, challenges were raised regarding the feasibility of applications envisioned by advocates of molecular nanotechnology, which culminated in a public debate between Drexler and Smalley in 2001 and 2003. Meanwhile, commercialization of products based on advancements in nanoscale technologies began emerging and these products are limited to bulk applications of nanomaterials and do not involve atomic control of matter. Governments moved to promote and fund research into nanotechnology, such as in the U. S, by the mid-2000s new and serious scientific attention began to flourish. Projects emerged to produce nanotechnology roadmaps which center on atomically precise manipulation of matter and discuss existing and projected capabilities, goals, Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. This covers both current work and concepts that are more advanced, one nanometer is one billionth, or 10−9, of a meter. By comparison, typical carbon-carbon bond lengths, or the spacing between atoms in a molecule, are in the range 0. 12–0.15 nm. On the other hand, the smallest cellular life-forms, the bacteria of the genus Mycoplasma, are around 200 nm in length, by convention, nanotechnology is taken as the scale range 1 to 100 nm following the definition used by the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the US. The lower limit is set by the size of atoms since nanotechnology must build its devices from atoms and molecules
4.
Internet of things
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In 2013 the Global Standards Initiative on Internet of Things defined the IoT as the infrastructure of the information society. Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure, experts estimate that the IoT will consist of almost 50 billion objects by 2020. Legal scholars suggest to look at Things as a mixture of hardware, software, data. These devices collect data with the help of various existing technologies. IoT is one of the platforms of todays Smart City, the term the Internet of Things was coined by Kevin Ashton of Procter & Gamble, later MITs Auto-ID Center, in 1999. This means that the fields of embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, control systems, automation. Mark Weisers seminal 1991 paper on ubiquitous computing, The Computer of the 21st Century, as well as venues such as UbiComp. In 1994 Reza Raji described the concept in IEEE Spectrum as small packets of data to a set of nodes. Between 1993 and 1996 several companies proposed solutions like Microsofts at Work or Novells NEST, however, only in 1999 did the field start gathering momentum. Bill Joy envisioned Device to Device communication as part of his Six Webs framework, the concept of the Internet of Things became popular in 1999, through the Auto-ID Center at MIT and related market-analysis publications. Radio-frequency identification was seen by Kevin Ashton as a prerequisite for the Internet of things at that point, Ashton prefers the phrase Internet for Things. If all objects and people in life were equipped with identifiers, computers could manage. Besides using RFID, the tagging of things may be achieved through such technologies as near field communication, barcodes, QR codes, for instance, instant and ceaseless inventory control would become ubiquitous. A persons ability to interact with objects could be altered based on immediate or present needs. According to Gartner, Inc. there will be nearly 20.8 billion devices on the Internet of things by 2020, ABI Research estimates that more than 30 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the Internet of things by 2020. As such, it is clear that the IoT will consist of a large number of devices being connected to the Internet. In an active move to new and emerging technological innovation. The ability to network embedded devices with limited CPU, memory, on the other hand, IoT systems could also be responsible for performing actions, not just sensing things
5.
3D printing
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Objects can be of almost any shape or geometry and are produced using digital model data from a 3D model or another electronic data source such as an Additive Manufacturing File file. The term 3D printing originally referred to a process that deposits a binder material onto a bed with inkjet printer heads layer by layer. More recently, the term is being used in popular vernacular to encompass a variety of additive manufacturing techniques. United States and global technical standards use the term additive manufacturing for this broader sense. Early additive manufacturing equipment and materials were developed in the 1980s, but on July 16,1984 Alain Le Méhauté, Olivier de Witte and Jean Claude André filed their patent for the stereolithography process. It was three weeks before Chuck Hull filed his own patent for stereolithography, the application of French inventors were abandoned by the French General Electric Company and CILAS. The claimed reason was for lack of business perspective, Hull defined the process as a system for generating three-dimensional objects by creating a cross-sectional pattern of the object to be formed, but this had been already invented by Kodama. Hulls contribution is the design of the STL file format widely accepted by 3D printing software as well as the digital slicing, the term 3D printing originally referred to a process employing standard and custom inkjet print heads. The technology used by most 3D printers to date—especially hobbyist and consumer-oriented models—is fused deposition modeling, AM processes for metal sintering or melting usually went by their own individual names in the 1980s and 1990s. But AM-type sintering was beginning to challenge that assumption, by the mid 1990s, new techniques for material deposition were developed at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University, including microcasting and sprayed materials. Sacrificial and support materials had become more common, enabling new object geometries. The umbrella term additive manufacturing gained wider currency in the decade of the 2000s, as the various additive processes matured, it became clear that soon metal removal would no longer be the only metalworking process done under that type of control. It was during this decade that the term subtractive manufacturing appeared as a retronym for the family of machining processes with metal removal as their common theme. The term subtractive has not replaced the term machining, instead complementing it when a term that covers any removal method is needed, both terms reflect the simple fact that the technologies all share the common theme of sequential-layer material addition/joining throughout a 3D work envelope under automated control. The 2010s were the first decade in which metal end use parts such as engine brackets, agile tooling uses a cost effective and high quality method to quickly respond to customer and market needs. It can be used in hydro-forming, stamping, injection molding, as technology matured, several authors had begun to speculate that 3D printing could aid in sustainable development in the developing world. 3D printable models may be created with a computer-aided design package, via a 3D scanner, or by a digital camera. 3D printed models created with CAD result in reduced errors and can be corrected before printing, allowing verification in the design of the object before it is printed, the manual modeling process of preparing geometric data for 3D computer graphics is similar to plastic arts such as sculpting
6.
World Economic Forum
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The World Economic Forum is a Swiss nonprofit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva. The Forum is best known for its meeting at the end of January in Davos. The meeting brings together some 2,500 top business leaders, international leaders, economists. Often this location alone is used to identify meetings, participation, and participants with such phrases as, a Davos panel, beside meetings, the foundation produces a series of research reports and engages its members in sector specific initiatives. The forum was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, a German-born business professor at the University of Geneva and he then founded the WEF as a nonprofit organization based in Geneva and drew European business leaders to Davos for the annual meetings each January. Political leaders soon began to use the meeting as a neutral platform. The Davos Declaration was signed in 1988 by Greece and Turkey, in 1992, South African President F. W. de Klerk met with Nelson Mandela and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi at the annual meeting, their first joint appearance outside South Africa. At the 1994 annual meeting, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat reached an agreement on Gaza. In late 2015, the invitation was extended to include a North Korean delegation for the 2016 forum, in view of positive signs coming out of the country, North Korea has not been attending the WEF since 1998. In 2017, the World Economic Forum in Davos attracted considerable attention when for the first time and he sharply rebuked the current populist movements that would introduce tariffs and hinder global commerce, warning that such protectionism could foster isolation and reduced economic opportunity. Headquartered in Cologny, the forum also has offices in New York, Beijing, on October 10,2016, the Forum announced the opening of its new Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco. The World Economic Forum strives to be impartial and is not tied to any political, partisan, the foundation is committed to improving the State of the World. Until 2012, it had observer status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the foundations highest governance body is the foundation board. During its annual meeting, more than 2,500 participants from slightly fewer than 100 countries gather in Davos, approximately 1,500 are business leaders, drawn from its members,1,000 of the worlds top companies. The foundation is funded by its 1,000 member companies and these enterprises rank among the top companies within their industry and/or country and play a leading role in shaping the future of their industry and/or region. Membership is stratified by the level of engagement with forum activities, with the level of membership fees increasing as participation in meetings, projects, and initiatives rises. As of 2011, an annual membership costs $52,000 for a member, $263,000 for Industry Partner. An admission fee costs $19,000 per person, in 2014, WEF raised annual fees by 20 percent, making the cost for Strategic Partner from SFr500,000 to SFr600,000
7.
Puffing Billy (locomotive)
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It was the first commercial adhesion steam locomotive, employed to haul coal chaldron wagons from the mine at Wylam to the docks at Lemington-on-Tyne in Northumberland. Puffing Billy was one of the three engines built by Hedley, the resident engineer at Wylam Colliery, to replace the horses used as motive power on the tramway. In 1813 Hedley built for Blacketts colliery business on the Wylam Colliery line the prototypes, Puffing Billy and they were both rebuilt in 1815 with ten wheels, but were returned to their original condition in 1830 when the railway was relaid with stronger rails. From the context this is at a different location to Blücher, Puffing Billy remained in service until 1862, when Edward Blackett, the owner of Wylam Colliery, lent it to the Patent Office Museum in South Kensington, London. He later sold it to the museum for £200 and it is still on display there. Its sister locomotive, Wylam Dilly, is preserved in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, a replica has been built and was first run in 2006 at Beamish Museum. Another replica, built 1906 in a Royal Bavarian State Railways workshop, can be found in the German Museum, Puffing Billy incorporated a number of novel features, patented by Hedley, which were to prove important to the development of locomotives. The engine had a number of technical limitations. Running on cast iron Wagonway plates, its weight was too heavy and broke them. This problem was alleviated by redesigning the engine with four axles so that the weight was more evenly. The engine was rebuilt as a four-wheeler when improved edge rails track was introduced around 1830. It was not particularly fast, being capable of no more than 5 mph and it also entered the language as a metaphor for an energetic traveller, and phrases like puffing like Billy-o and running like Billy-o are thought to derive from the locomotives name. Kirtley, Allan, Longbottom, Patricia, Blackett, Martin
8.
Science Museum, London
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The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and today is one of the major tourist attractions. Like other publicly funded museums in the United Kingdom, the Science Museum does not charge visitors for admission. Temporary exhibitions, however, may incur an admission fee and it is part of the Science Museum Group, having merged with the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester in 2012. It included a collection of machinery which became the Museum of Patents in 1858, and this collection contained many of the most famous exhibits of what is now the Science Museum. In 1883, the contents of the Patent Office Museum were transferred to the South Kensington Museum, in 1885, the Science Collections were renamed the Science Museum and in 1893 a separate director was appointed. The Art Collections were renamed the Art Museum, which became the Victoria. When Queen Victoria laid the stone for the new building for the Art Museum, she stipulated that the museum be renamed after herself. On 26 June 1909 the Science Museum, as an independent entity, the Science Museums present quarters, designed by Sir Richard Allison, were opened to the public in stages over the period 1919–28. This building was known as the East Block, construction of which began in 1913, as the name suggests it was intended to be the first building of a much larger project, which was never realized. It also contains hundreds of interactive exhibits, a recent addition is the IMAX 3D Cinema showing science and nature documentaries, most of them in 3-D, and the Wellcome Wing which focuses on digital technology. Entrance has been free since 1 December 2001, the museum houses some of the many objects collected by Henry Wellcome around a medical theme. The fourth floor exhibit is called Glimpses of Medical History, with reconstructions, the fifth floor gallery is called Science and the Art of Medicine, with exhibits of medical instruments and practices from ancient days and from many countries. The collection is strong in clinical medicine, biosciences and public health, the museum is a member of the London Museums of Health & Medicine. The Science Museum has a library, and until the 1960s was Britains National Library for Science, Medicine. It holds runs of periodicals, early books and manuscripts, and is used by scholars worldwide and it was, for a number of years, run in conjunction with the Library of Imperial College, but in 2007 the Library was divided over two sites. The Imperial College library catalogue search system now informs searchers that volumes formerly held there are Available at Science Museum Library Swindon Currently unavailable, a new Research Centre with library facilities is promised for late 2015 but is unlikely to have book stacks nearby. The Science Museums medical collections have a scope and coverage
9.
Steam engine
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A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. Steam engines are combustion engines, where the working fluid is separate from the combustion products. Non-combustion heat sources such as power, nuclear power or geothermal energy may be used. The ideal thermodynamic cycle used to analyze this process is called the Rankine cycle, in the cycle, water is heated and transforms into steam within a boiler operating at a high pressure. When expanded through pistons or turbines, mechanical work is done, the reduced-pressure steam is then exhausted to the atmosphere, or condensed and pumped back into the boiler. Specialized devices such as hammers and steam pile drivers are dependent on the steam pressure supplied from a separate boiler. The use of boiling water to mechanical motion goes back over 2000 years. The Spanish inventor Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont obtained the first patent for an engine in 1606. In 1698 Thomas Savery patented a steam pump that used steam in direct contact with the water being pumped, Saverys steam pump used condensing steam to create a vacuum and draw water into a chamber, and then applied pressurized steam to further pump the water. Thomas Newcomens atmospheric engine was the first commercial steam engine using a piston. In 1781 James Watt patented an engine that produced continuous rotary motion. Watts ten-horsepower engines enabled a range of manufacturing machinery to be powered. The engines could be sited anywhere that water and coal or wood fuel could be obtained, by 1883, engines that could provide 10,000 hp had become feasible. The stationary steam engine was a key component of the Industrial Revolution, the aeolipile described by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century AD is considered to be the first recorded steam engine. Torque was produced by steam jets exiting the turbine, in the Spanish Empire, the great inventor Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont obtained a patent for the first steam engine in history in 1603. Thomas Savery, in 1698, patented the first practical, atmospheric pressure and it had no piston or moving parts, only taps. It was an engine, a kind of thermic syphon, in which steam was admitted to an empty container. The vacuum thus created was used to water from the sump at the bottom of the mine
10.
Second Industrial Revolution
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The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, was a phase of rapid industrialization in the final third of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The First Industrial Revolution, which ended in the early to mid 1800s, was punctuated by a slowdown in macroinventions before the Second Industrial Revolution in 1870. The enormous expansion of rail and telegraph lines after 1870 allowed unprecedented movement of people and ideas, in the same period new systems were introduced, most significantly electrical power and telephones. The Second Industrial Revolution continued into the 20th century with early factory electrification and the production line, and ended at the start of the First World War. The Second Industrial Revolution was a period of industrial development, primarily in Britain, Germany and the United States, but also in France. It followed on from the First Industrial Revolution that began in Britain in the late 18th century that then spread throughout Western Europe and it also was the period during which modern organizational methods for operating large scale businesses over vast areas came into use. However, some continue to express reservations about its use, Vaclav Smil called the period 1867–1914 The Age of Synergy during which most of the great innovations were developed. Unlike the First Industrial Revolution, the inventions and innovations were engineering, a synergy between iron and steel, railroads and coal developed at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. Railroads allowed cheap transportation of materials and products, which in turn led to cheap rails to build more roads, railroads also benefited from cheap coal for their steam locomotives. This synergy led to the laying of 75,000 miles of track in the U. S. in the 1880s, falling costs for producing wrought iron coincided with the emergence of the railway in the 1830s. The early technique of hot blast used iron for the heating medium. Iron caused problems with expansion and contraction, which stressed the iron, Edward Alfred Cowper developed the Cowper stove in 1857. This stove used firebrick as a medium, solving the expansion. The Cowper stove was also capable of producing heat, which resulted in very high throughput of blast furnaces. The Cowper stove is used in todays blast furnaces. With the greatly reduced cost of producing pig iron with coke using hot blast, demand grew dramatically, the Bessemer process greatly reduced the cost, allowing the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron. The key principle was the removal of carbon and other impurities from the iron by oxidation with air blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature of the mass and keeps it molten
11.
World War I
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World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history and it was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and paved the way for major political changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved. The war drew in all the worlds great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances, the Allies versus the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. These alliances were reorganised and expanded as more nations entered the war, Italy, Japan, the trigger for the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. This set off a crisis when Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia. Within weeks, the powers were at war and the conflict soon spread around the world. On 25 July Russia began mobilisation and on 28 July, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia, Germany presented an ultimatum to Russia to demobilise, and when this was refused, declared war on Russia on 1 August. Germany then invaded neutral Belgium and Luxembourg before moving towards France, after the German march on Paris was halted, what became known as the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, with a trench line that changed little until 1917. On the Eastern Front, the Russian army was successful against the Austro-Hungarians, in November 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, opening fronts in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and the Sinai. In 1915, Italy joined the Allies and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, Romania joined the Allies in 1916, after a stunning German offensive along the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the Allies rallied and drove back the Germans in a series of successful offensives. By the end of the war or soon after, the German Empire, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, national borders were redrawn, with several independent nations restored or created, and Germanys colonies were parceled out among the victors. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Big Four imposed their terms in a series of treaties, the League of Nations was formed with the aim of preventing any repetition of such a conflict. This effort failed, and economic depression, renewed nationalism, weakened successor states, and feelings of humiliation eventually contributed to World War II. From the time of its start until the approach of World War II, at the time, it was also sometimes called the war to end war or the war to end all wars due to its then-unparalleled scale and devastation. In Canada, Macleans magazine in October 1914 wrote, Some wars name themselves, during the interwar period, the war was most often called the World War and the Great War in English-speaking countries. Will become the first world war in the sense of the word. These began in 1815, with the Holy Alliance between Prussia, Russia, and Austria, when Germany was united in 1871, Prussia became part of the new German nation. Soon after, in October 1873, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors between the monarchs of Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany
12.
Telephone
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A telephone, or phone, is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be heard directly. In 1876, Scottish emigrant Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be granted a United States patent for a device that produced clearly intelligible replication of the human voice and this instrument was further developed by many others. The telephone was the first device in history that people to talk directly with each other across large distances. Telephones rapidly became indispensable to businesses, government, and households, the essential elements of a telephone are a microphone to speak into and an earphone which reproduces the voice in a distant location. Until approximately the 1970s most telephones used a dial, which was superseded by the modern DTMF push-button dial. The receiver and transmitter are usually built into a handset which is held up to the ear, the dial may be located either on the handset, or on a base unit to which the handset is connected. The transmitter converts the sound waves to electrical signals which are sent through the network to the receiving phone. The receiving telephone converts the signals into audible sound in the receiver, telephones permit duplex communication, meaning they allow the people on both ends to talk simultaneously. The first telephones were connected to each other from one customers office or residence to another customers location. Being impractical beyond just a few customers, these systems were replaced by manually operated centrally located switchboards. For greater mobility, various systems were developed for transmission between mobile stations on ships and automobiles in the middle 20th century. Hand-held mobile phone]s was introduced for personal service starting in 1973, by the late 1970s several mobile telephone networks operated around the world. In 1983, the Advanced Mobile Phone System was launched, offering a standardized technology providing portability for users far beyond the residence or office. These analog cellular system evolved into digital networks with better security, greater capacity, better regional coverage, the public switched telephone network, with its hierarchical system of many switching centers, interconnects telephones around the world for communication with each other. With the standardized international numbering system, E.164, each line has an identifying telephone number. Although originally designed for voice communications, convergence has enabled most modern cell phones to have many additional capabilities. Since 1999, the trend for mobile phones is smartphones that integrate all mobile communication, a traditional landline telephone system, also known as plain old telephone service, commonly carries both control and audio signals on the same twisted pair of insulated wires, the telephone line. The control and signaling equipment consists of three components, the ringer, the hookswitch, and a dial, the ringer, or beeper, light or other device, alerts the user to incoming calls
