Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: When were telephones first used in homes?
Following the invention of the telephone in 1876, the first telephones were rented in pairs which were limited to conversation between the parties operating those two instruments. The use of a central exchange was soon found to be even more advantageous than in telegraphy. In January 1878 the Boston Telephone Dispatch company had started hiring boys as telephone operators. Boys had been very successful as telegraphy operators, but their attitude, lack of patience, and behavior was unacceptable for live telephone contact, so the company began hiring women operators instead. Thus, on September 1, 1878, Boston Telephone Dispatch hired Emma Nutt as the first woman operator. Small towns typically had the switchboard installed in the operator's home so that he or she could answer calls on a 24-hour basis. In 1894, New England Telephone and Telegraph Company installed the first battery-operated switchboard on January 9 in Lexington, Massachusetts.
San Francisco continued to install manual offices throughout the 1920s. When PT&T took over the operations of its San Francisco and Oakland competitor, Home Telephone Co., in the early 1920s, their customers were switched from Home's dial service to Pacific Telephone manual exchanges. A 1927 Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. publication proudly describes the company's newest manual offices, without a word of plans to introduce dial service. San Francisco's first dial office, ORdway, opened on 23 March 1929. The first suburban step-by-step (electromechanical stepping switch) office opened in Palo Alto in 1929.
Listening habits changed in the 1960s due to the introduction of the revolutionary transistor radio, which made possible by the invention of the transistor in 1946. Their compact size — small enough to fit in a shirt pocket — and lower power requirements, compared to vacuum tubes, meant that for the first time radio receivers were readily portable. The transistor radio became the most widely used communication device in history, with billions manufactured by the 1970s. Radio became a ubiquitous "companion medium" which people could take with them anywhere they went.
Electric sound recording and reproduction are electrical or mechanical techniques and devices for the inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. Acoustic analog recording is achieved by a small microphone diaphragm that can record sound waves on a phonograph (in which a stylus senses grooves on a record) or magnetic tape. The first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and patented in 1878. 
The next major technical development was the invention of the gramophone disc in 1889. For much of the 20th century, records were the most common way of selling sound recordings. The widespread availability of records and the development of radio broadcasting enabled a much larger proportion of people to listen to songs and pieces performed by the top artists, enabling the development of national and even international musical stars. In the 1970s, the compact cassette became a major consumer audio format. Advances in electronic and mechanical miniaturization led to the development of the Sony Walkman, a pocket-sized cassette player introduced in 1979, which allowed consumers to listen to their favourite albums outside of their home.
During the first decade of the 20th century, some songs under the name of samba were recorded, but these recordings did not achieve great popularity. However, in 1917, ""Pelo Telefone"" ("By Telephone") was recorded, and it is considered the first true samba. The song was claimed to be authored by Ernesto dos Santos, best known as , with co-composition attributed to Mauro de Almeida, a well-known Carnival columnist. Actually, "Pelo Telefone" was created by a collective of musicians who participated in celebrations at the house of Tia Ciata (Aunt Ciata). It was eventually registered by Donga and the Almeida National Library.
The development of thermionic valves starting around 1902, provided an entirely electronic method of amplifying signals. The first practical version of such devices was the Audion triode, invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest, which led to the first amplifiers around 1912. Since the only previous device which was widely used to strengthen a signal was the relay used in telegraph systems, the amplifying vacuum tube was first called an "electron relay". The terms "amplifier" and "amplification", derived from the Latin "amplificare", ("to enlarge or expand"), were first used for this new capability around 1915 when triodes became widespread.
German inventor Johann Philipp Reis designed an early sound transmitter that used a metallic strip attached to a vibrating membrane that would produce intermittent current. Better results were achieved with the "liquid transmitter" design in Scottish-American Alexander Graham Bell's telephone of 1876 – the diaphragm was attached to a conductive rod in an acid solution. These systems, however, gave a very poor sound quality.
The first microphone that enabled proper voice telephony was the (loose-contact) carbon microphone. This was independently developed by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the US. Although Edison was awarded the first patent (after a long legal dispute) in mid-1877, Hughes had demonstrated his working device in front of many witnesses some years earlier, and most historians credit him with its invention. The carbon microphone is the direct prototype of today's microphones and was critical in the development of telephony, broadcasting and the recording industries. Thomas Edison refined the carbon microphone into his carbon-button transmitter of 1886. This microphone was employed at the first ever radio broadcast, a performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in 1910.
In 1916, E.C. Wente of Western Electric developed the next breakthrough with the first condenser microphone. In 1923, the first practical moving coil microphone was built. The Marconi-Sykes magnetophone, developed by Captain H. J. Round, became the standard for BBC studios in London. This was improved in 1930 by Alan Blumlein and Herbert Holman who released the HB1A and was the best standard of the day.
Television became available in crude experimental forms in the late 1920s, but it would still be several years before the new technology would be marketed to consumers. After World War II, an improved form of black-and-white TV broadcasting became popular in the United States and Britain, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses, and institutions. During the 1950s, television was the primary medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the US and most other developed countries. The availability of multiple types of archival storage media such as Betamax, VHS tape, local disks, DVDs, flash drives, high-definition Blu-ray Discs, and cloud digital video recorders has enabled viewers to watch pre-recorded material—such as movies—at home on their own time schedule. For many reasons, especially the convenience of remote retrieval, the storage of television and video programming now occurs on the cloud. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity. Another development was the move from standard-definition television (SDTV) (576i, with 576 interlaced lines of resolution and 480i) to high-definition television (HDTV), which provides a resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats: 1080p, 1080i and 720p. Since 2010, with the invention of smart television, Internet television has increased the availability of television programs and movies via the Internet through streaming video services such as Netflix, Amazon Video, iPlayer, Hulu, Roku and Chromecast.
For the "Telegraphy" entry in the 1903 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, contributor John Ambrose Fleming wrote that: "Many other more or less imperfect devices—such as those of Mahlon Loomis, put forward in 1872 and 1877, and Kitsee in 1895—for wireless telegraphy were not within the region of practically realizable schemes." In 1904, A. T. Story surveyed the available information, and felt the need to include the qualifier "if we are to believe the reports", before stating that then "the attempt to communicate between the two summits was successful". In 1907 Lucien Poincaré authored a comprehensive overview of "modern physics" which flatly dismissed Loomis' self-reported successes as not even being worthy of review, and the English translation of this book added the pejorative description of Loomis as "an American quack".
A transistor radio is a small portable radio receiver that uses transistor-based circuitry. Following their development in 1954, made possible by the invention of the transistor in 1947, they became the most popular electronic communication device in history, with billions manufactured during the 1960s and 1970s. Their pocket size sparked a change in popular music listening habits, allowing people to listen to music anywhere they went. Beginning in the 1980s, however, cheap AM transistor radios were superseded by devices with higher audio quality such as portable CD players, personal audio players, boomboxes, and (eventually) smartphones, some of which contain radios themselves.
The primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid- to late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as "talking pictures", or "talkies", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was "The Jazz Singer", released in October 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures.
Though spoken recordings were popular in 33⅓ vinyl record format for schools and libraries into the early 1970s, the beginning of the modern retail market for audiobooks can be traced to the wide adoption of cassette tapes during the 1970s. Cassette tapes were invented in 1963 and a few libraries, such as the Library of Congress, began distributing books on cassette by 1969. However, during the 1970s, a number of technological innovations allowed the cassette tape wider usage in libraries and also spawned the creation of new commercial audiobook market. These innovations included the introduction of small and cheap portable players such as the Walkman, and the widespread use of cassette decks in cars, particularly imported Japanese models which flooded the market during the multiple energy crises of the decade.
The invention of the television was the work of many individuals in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Individuals and corporations competed in various parts of the world to deliver a device that superseded previous technology. Many were compelled to capitalize on the invention and make profit, while some wanted to change the world through visual and audio communication technology.
At the Radiotelegraphic Convention meeting in London in 1912, the section of the Convention covering "Transmission of Radiograms" included the statement that "The signals to be employed are those of Morse International Code." Even after this, the original Morse Code continued to be used throughout much of the United States. American Morse remained the standard for U.S. landline telegraph companies, including the dominant company, Western Union, in part because the original code, with fewer dashes, could be sent about 5% faster than International Morse. American Morse also was commonly used for domestic radio transmissions on the Great Lakes, and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. However, International Morse predominated for ocean-going vessels, and many U.S. shipboard operators became skilled in transmitting both versions of the Code as needed.
Modern air conditioning emerged from advances in chemistry during the 19th century, and the first large-scale electrical air conditioning was invented and used in 1902 by US inventor Willis Carrier. The introduction of residential air conditioning in the 1920s helped enable the great migration to the Sun Belt in the United States.
The first person to use resonant circuits in a radio application was Nikola Tesla, who invented the resonant transformer in 1891. At a March 1893 St. Louis lecture he had demonstrated a wireless system that, although it was intended for wireless power transmission, had many of the elements of later radio communication systems. A grounded capacitance-loaded spark-excited resonant transformer (his "Tesla coil") attached to an elevated wire monopole antenna transmitted radio waves, which were received across the room by a similar wire antenna attached to a receiver consisting of a second grounded resonant transformer tuned to the transmitter's frequency, which lighted a Geissler tube. This system, patented by Tesla 2 September 1897, 4 months after Lodge's "syntonic" patent, was in effect an inductively coupled radio transmitter and receiver, the first use of the "four circuit" system claimed by Marconi in his 1900 patent "(below)". However, Tesla was mainly interested in wireless power and never developed a practical radio "communication" system.
A cellular telephone switching plan was described by Fluhr and Nussbaum in 1973, and a cellular telephone data signaling system was described in 1977 by Hachenburg et al.
The Morse code was developed so that operators could translate the indentations marked on the paper tape into text messages. In his earliest code, Morse had planned to transmit only numerals, and to use a codebook to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. However, the code was soon expanded by Alfred Vail in 1840 to include letters and special characters, so it could be used more generally. Vail estimated the frequency of use of letters in the English language by counting the movable type he found in the type-cases of a local newspaper in Morristown. The shorter marks were called "dots", and the longer ones "dashes", and the letters most commonly used were assigned the shorter sequences of dots and dashes. This code was used since 1844 and became known as "Morse landline code" or "American Morse code".
In 1857, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first device that could record sound waves as they passed through the air. It was intended only for visual study of the recording and could not play back the sound. The recording medium was a sheet of soot-coated paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder carried on a threaded rod. A stylus, attached to a diaphragm through a series of levers, traced a line through the soot, creating a graphic record of the motions of the diaphragm as it was minutely propelled back and forth by the audio-frequency variations in air pressure.
The development of transistors in 1948 by Bell Laboratories led to major improvements to the hearing aid. The transistor was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Transistors were created to replace vacuum tubes; they were small, required less battery power and had less distortion and heat than their predecessor. These vacuum tubes were typically hot and fragile, so the transistor was the ideal replacement.The 1952 Sonotone 1010 used a transistor stage along with vacuum tubes, to extend battery life. The size of these transistors led to developments in miniature, carbon microphones. These microphones could be mounted on various items, even eyeglasses. In 1951, Raytheon manufactured the transistor and was one of the first companies to mass-produce transistors to throughout America. Raytheon realized that their hearing aid only lasted short-term and began to sell the vacuum-tube hearing aids again along with transistor hearing aids.
Litke's wireless microphone was first tested at the Olympic trials held at Stanford University in 1959. Next, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC television) tested the microphone at the Democratic and Republican Conventions in 1960. Candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were among the first celebrities to use the Vega-Mike. TV anchor John Daly praised Litke's invention on the ABC television news broadcast in July 1960. Daly introduced it to Americans with the words: "This is a Vega-Mike" and went on to explain it "is a wireless microphone, six inches long... without any wires of any kind..." Daly pointed out it could be used to broadcast "within the (convention) hall or outside... without the inconvenience of interconnecting microphone cables..." Even the Federal Communication Commission was impressed with it. The FCC gave him 12 frequencies instead of the one he was seeking.
Richardson introduced the Police Telephone System throughout the Borough during the First World War. They were attached to tram line poles and for the first time Constables on the Beat could contact Harrison Rd. H.Q. Telephone boxes were introduced in 1925 and pillar type telephone boxes (soon to go nationwide) which could be used by the public in emergencies. These were used in Halifax until 1967. An article headed "Police Signals". records that" Lt. Col. Sir Hugh Turnbill, Commissioner of the London City Police, is making full use of electrical devices in connection with his force. He is experimenting with a signaling system in connection with the present ambulance alarm posts. The Journal remarks: Halifax was one of the first towns to introduce this system. When will these who follow the doings of Halifax, as we have wondered before, give Halifax and its Chief Constable the credit that is due in them, and acknowledge Halifax as the very first town to adopt these street signals for the purpose of communicating from headquarters with men on the various beats. There are 24 such lights in operation in Halifax now and the system has been in use for over 20 years. It has been a great boon. For instance, before it was introduced, if headquarters wished to pass any kind of information on to the man on duty in the streets it could only be done by messenger, a waste of time and a very cumbrous method compared with that in existence today." However, it was not until 1937 that London saw telephones that were erected in Pillars in quantity. Soon, their use was extended to the public.
Telephone numbers were first used in 1879 in Lowell, Massachusetts, when they replaced the request for subscriber names by callers connecting to the switchboard operator. Over the course of telephone history, telephone numbers had various lengths and formats, and even included most letters of the alphabet in leading positions when telephone exchange names were in common use until the 1960s.
The earliest telephones had only one wire for both transmitting and receiving of audio, and used a ground return path, as was found in telegraph systems. The earliest dynamic telephones also had only one opening for sound, and the user alternately listened and spoke (rather, shouted) into the same hole. Sometimes the instruments were operated in pairs at each end, making conversation more convenient but also more expensive.
At first, the benefits of a "switchboard" exchange were not exploited. Instead, telephones were leased in pairs to the subscriber, for example one for his home and one for his shop, and the subscriber had to arrange with telegraph contractors to construct a line between them. Users who wanted the ability to speak to three or four different shops, suppliers etc. would obtain and set up three or four pairs of telephones. Western Union, already using telegraph exchanges, quickly extended the principle to its telephones in New York City and San Francisco, and Bell was not slow in appreciating the potential.
When telephone numbers were first used they were very short, from one to three digits, and were communicated orally to a switchboard operator when initiating a call. As telephone systems have grown and interconnected to encompass worldwide communication, telephone numbers have become longer. In addition to telephones, they have been used to access other devices, such as computer modems, pagers, and fax machines. With landlines, modems and pagers falling out of use in favor of all-digital always-connected broadband Internet and mobile phones, telephone numbers are now often used by data-only cellular devices, such as some tablet computers, digital televisions, video game controllers, and mobile hotspots, on which it is not even possible to make or accept a call.