LET US REDIAL

From telegraph to the round dialing toy and size zero-smartphone – telecom has evolved to become wireless. Here is a quick jog down the memory lane

- PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

Imagine if Alexander Graham Bell was living in a submarine for the last seven decades. If he were to suddenly pop out on some remote beach in India, he would be a tad shocked to see that thing a fisherman is carrying around. He would look at the mobile phone and mutter – “Whoa! You have grown so ‘small’ kid!”

He would not be wrong to say that. They called it telephone perhaps due to some Greek factor again. They mixed the word “tele”, for ’a far’ and “phone”, for “voice or voice sound”. That has, incidentally, been pretty much the elevator-gist of the story of telephone in India too. It starts a century back.

The humble telegraph lineage

A lot of the initial pages of this history talk about the Britishers entering India. They, unlike, Europeans embraced the telephone with a lot of fervor and telephone lines. Colonialism spread these lines to India too.