This day in history: The first push-button telephone went into service on this day in 1963.
Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed. As with other influential inventions such as radio, television, the light bulb, and the computer, several inventors pioneered experimental work on voice transmission over a wire and improved on each other's ideas. New controversies over the issue still arise from time to time. Charles Bourseul, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray, amongst others, have all been credited with the invention of the telephone.
Phones have certainly changed over the decades. There are 100,000 pay phones left in America, but you would be hard-pressed to find one. They were certainly useful in The Matrix, Get Smart and Superman, and let's not forget the Colin Farrell 2002 thriller "Phone Booth." New York City, which once had 30,000 payphones, removed its last public payphone in 2022.
Another great movie was "Cellular" with Kim Basinger and Jason Statham which is now dated because it was released shortly before the advent of the Smartphone. There are also still people using rotary dial phones, though they stopped making them long ago.
In 2002, only 10% of the world's population used mobile phones and by 2005 that percentage had risen to 46%. By the end of 2009, there were a total of nearly 6 billion mobile and fixed-line telephone subscribers worldwide. This included 1.26 billion fixed-line subscribers and 4.6 billion mobile subscribers.
Today, the number of people that own a smart and feature phone is 7.26 Billion, making up 91.00% of the world's population.
There is a Telephone Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. Perhaps they have the red phone used in the 1960s Batman show.
