History of the Telephone Cable

Early telephone lines were nothing more than simple iron or steel wire strung across poles. The very first telephone line was put up by Charles Williams Jr to connect his home in Somerville, MA with his office in Boston in 1877. Private lines such as this had no ability to call outside the two households in which they were connected. Switching stations were quickly created where operators could manually switch lines to allow calls to multiple households.The first "long-distance" call was between Brantford, Ontario and Paris, Ontario and took place using telegraph lines. At this time there were no phone numbers, calls were made only by name.

For the first years the Bell telephone company held a complete monopoly. As a consequence it focused only on building lines in urban areas where customers were housed close together. The people in rural areas began building "farmer lines" through cooperative efforts. The quality of these early lines was extremely poor. Some farmers had to use barbed wire in place of the steel wires being used resulting in even heavier static and poorer quality on the line. However, despite all the setbacks, telephones became very common by 1910.

The first major improvement in telephone lines came from technology that allowed for the creation of pulled copper wire. Conductive copper wires were pulled, insulted and twisted in bundles of 50. This allowed more houses to be connected, though problems with muffled or unrecognizable voices still continued.

During World War II coaxial cable was developed and laid as the new transmission method. A coaxial cable consists of a conductive material over an insulated core. This type of cable allowed a technique called multiplexing to be used. This technique changes the frequency of signals so that more signals can be transferred on the same line. A line of this type was run across beneath the Atlantic Ocean in 1956.

Advancements are constantly being made in the area of telephone lines. One of the most recent is ADSL, or asymmetrical digital subscriber line. It uses your normal telephone copper wire and achieves high data transfer speeds and quality for Internet access. The asymmetric is because prescribers receive much less bandwidth for uploading than downloading and this is the difference between ADSL and normal DSL. This works because website requests are much smaller than the downloads. Access is to ADSL is currently limited to those prescribers who are close to a telephone station. Research continues to be done to make this service more widely available and to improve capacity and quality of telephone lines.