Smartphones and crypto, are a match everyone in the community more than likely predicted some time ago. And that time has finally come, with major telecom players, HTC and Samsung spearheading the road to the very first crypto smartphones. But what exactly are these new crypto smartphones and where do they come from?
Well for starters, HTC’s new premiere crypto phone will feature an array of crypto plus and minuses. With the ability to securely hold crypto keys and a feature that allows your friends and family to provide your key phrase should it ever be lost or compromised. Crypto phones like Samsungs will also be able to take part in Web 3.0, where decentralized apps will reign as kings and digital ownership will be the law of the land.
With all of this being said, it often helps to understand the history and the making of communication to truly understand where the market is heading. If we know how we got to where we are, we can better understand where crypto and communication are headed. With that in mind, let’s dive into how the phone first began and how digital communication was invented.
The Dawn of the Phone
Before we jump ahead a few centuries to cover what is new in crypto and communication, it helps to understand the history of the telephone and how its evolution has transformed the way human beings communicate in the 21st century. Starting with Robert Hooke and his ingenious invention of the tied string and two cans—surely, you have seen it once or twice in old Western films or even in the “Home Alone” film series.
The old-fashioned way of speaking with your best friends was with just a piece of string and a can. This incredible invention was brought up by Robert Hooke and was coined the “first acoustic telephone”.
Nearly two hundred years later, Samuel B. Morse realized he could emit sounds or beeps by simply pressing a button in intervals. This would transmit a pattern of sounds that would later be called the life-changing morse code. Governments and businesses alike would use it to transmit their most important messages for the rest of the century.
It was not until we reach 1858 that Cyrus Field sought to lay out the very first transatlantic telephone cable, connecting the United Kingdom and the United States by what would later be called the Telegraph.
Shipmen and sailors also invented their very own form of morse code in history.
Namely around 1867, when British Admiral Phillip Colomb came up with the idea to flash signal lamps to other ships out in the bay. Sailors would use this flashing as communication for some time before morse code eventually won out, leaving this sailor communication literally in the water.
Flash forward to 1867, Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher of the deaf, struggled with different ideas for the deaf population to communicate. And so he began on a century-long quest to bring digital communication to the land of the living. And he did it with the very first wireless call in 1880.
Bell invented what was called the photophone, where the sound was transmitted through a beam of light. This photophone would eventually develop into the very first landline. And in January 1915, Alexander Graham Bell performed the very first coast-to-coast phone call, ushering in the very first long-distance phone call.
Who Spoke To Who First?
The very first telephone service was set up between the United States of America and the United Kingdom in the winter of 1927. Back then, the very first phone to premier were radio phones. And the cost was substantial for both parties, costing each individual nearly ten dollars for a mere three minutes of talk time.
Interestingly enough, the very first video phone call was invented in 1930 by AT&T called the Iconophone. The Iconophone allowed users to see, hear, and reply to each other all in real-time. The very first Zoom call, if you will.
However, this invention was about one hundred years too early, and the mass markets were not ready for this type of technology. The progressive technology was handed off to Nazi Germany.
It was not until June 1946 that the very first wireless call was made on an automobile. And later that same year partners John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley created the transistor; which would replace vacuum tube systems and allow computers to merge with other electronic devices, aka the birth of smartphone development.
Then, in 1973, Martin Cooper would place the very first cellular mobile call to Joel Engle, a business rival at Bell Labs. This very first cell phone call took nearly an entire calendar year to recharge and lasted only 30 minutes.
Nearly a decade later, 1G Generation was introduced to the world by Japan. During that same time, the Nordic Mobile Telephone System was established in Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.
Only a few years later, Motorola brought forth “the brick” that would populate most of the 80s and serve as the grandfather cellphone for all other cellphones to come. Then, in 1992, the world’s very first commercial text message was sent to the employees of Logica CMG.
And in 1993, the very first smartphones became available to purchase for the population. IBM gave birth to Simon, with a full touch screen that could send and receive text messages and even faxes.
By 1998, a technology company by the name of Iridium put sixty-four satellites into space. These satellites served as the basis for the ever-popular satellite phones. This development would lead to the modern-day cellphone.
Then, by 2003, technology transmits phone calls over the internet. Now long-distance phone calls and their exorbitant charges could be remedied by the use of established computer networks.
And once phone calls could be transmitted by the internet, VoIP or voice over the internet was born. Transforming the face of the phone, phone lines, systems, and how we make calls between one business and another.
How Crypto Is Transforming Communication Today
This leads us to today and the dawning of the very first crypto phone, HTCs Exodus 1. This is a far cry from the original machines that connected the two world hemispheres, but one that is as important as ever. As Web 3.0 continues to change the way we as humans communicate with one another—and how we define digital ownership.
Projects like Sandbox, Meta’s Metaverse, and Decentraland are leading the future of communication where our smartphones will be windows into a limitless world, where one’s identity is owned by oneself and human connection is as limitless as the atoms that connect us.
