Section A
Lesson 1: The Telephone and the Telephone Network
The Patent Office granted Bell’s patent on March 7, three days before he transmitted speech in a Boston laboratory.
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Lesson 2: Differences Between the Telephone and the Telegraph
Theodore Vail, who had led AT&T in the 1880s and came back as its president in 1907, coined ‘universal service’ to mean universal interconnection into one system.
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Lesson 3: In Other Counties, PTTs (Posts, Telegraph and Telephone)
This lesson asks the comparative question of why the American telephone monopoly stayed in private hands, when most of the world ran its telephones through a government post office.
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Lesson 4: The Origin of Wireless
Broadcast radio arrived in the 1920s, and the technology behind it was already twenty years old.
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Section B
Lesson 5: Broadcast Radio and the Public Interest Standard
The commercial stations’ own industry sat on the committee that proposed ‘public interest’ as the test for federal licensing, at a 1925 conference.
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