Can you hear me now?

It’s a day for phones. And of course, who in today’s world could live without having one? It’s hard to think back to life before cell phones. Could you imagine living when there were no phones at all?

Well, thanks to our friend, Alexander Graham Bell, we don’t have to. So in tribute of him and two historic telephone milestones on June 20, today we learn a little more about phones.

Did you know that on today in 1877, our good buddy Bell installed the world's first commercial telephone service in Ontario, Canada? Yep! Now we get to pay someone for the right to speak to someone else across the street or miles away.

Do you think Bell ever thought they’d be charging us by the minute and by what time of day the call is made? That’s capitalism for you.

Also, did you know what telephone milestone was reach today in 1963? No? Well come on! June 20, 1963 is when the so-called "red telephone" was established between Soviet Union and United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The famous "red telephone" hotline linked the White House via National Military Command Center with the Kremlin during the Cold War – when reliable direct communications between the U.S. and the USSR was a vital necessity.

It all started during the crisis when it took nearly 12 hours to receive and decode Khruschev's 3,000 word initial settlement message (a really long time when there are nuclear warheads waiting to go off). By the time the U.S. had drafted a reply, a more threatening message from Moscow had been received demanding that U.S. missiles be removed from Turkey. So after all the dust settled, White House advisors thought that the crisis could have been more quickly, and more easily, averted if communication had been faster.

Initially the red phone was not actually a telephone, but a set of high-speed teleprinters. By the mid-1970s, the hotline featured an actual telephone. The hotline was used for the first time during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when both superpowers informed each other of military moves that might have been provocative or ambiguous.

:::Whew!::: Thank heavens for phones, right?

So, for more phone fun here’s some Trivia:

• The word telephone (or phone, for short) comes from Greek: tele=far away, and phone=voice.
• The modern handset came into existence when a Swedish lineman tied a microphone and earphone to a stick so he could keep a hand free.
• The folding portable phone was an intentional copy of the fictional futuristic communicators (which in use actually more closely resembled walkie-talkies, Nextel-style) used in the television show Star Trek.