Telephone
A device and system that converts speech into electrical signals so people can talk at a distance; after its late nineteenth-century Invention it developed into switched networks and mobile telephony.
In 1945, the US FCC chairman predicted handheld wireless telephones would arrive soon. Instead, radio spectrum went to television, delaying mobile communication by decades. AT&T forecast 900,000 US mobile users by 2000; the actual figure was 109 million.
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In 1957, a blind boy named Joe Engressia with perfect pitch discovered that whistling a 2600Hz tone into a telephone could manipulate the phone system. This became known as 'phreaking.' Among the next generation it inspired were Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
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