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Elisha Gray founds the Western Electric Manufacturing Company.
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Gray demonstrates his musical tones device and transmitted "familiar melodies through telegraph wire" at the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois.
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The Scientific American publishes the invention from Bell - at that time still without a ringer.
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Boston-Washington underground cable commenced commercial service.
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The first transcontinental (coast-to-coast) telephone call (3600 miles), with Thomas Augustus Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco receiving a call from Alexander Graham Bell at 15 Dey Street in New York City, facilitated by a newly invented vacuum tube amplifier
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First telephone call around the world by wire and radio.
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First geosynchronous communications satellite - 240 circuits or one TV signal
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Modular telephone cords and jacks introduced .
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The world's first fully automatic mobile phone system NMT is started in Sweden and Norway.
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Last manual telephone switchboard in Maine is retired.
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The GSM mobile phone network is started in Finland, with the first phone call in Tampere. GSM Stands for Global System for Mobile communications.
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Caller ID implemented nationally in USA.Caller ID information typically consists of the caller's telephone number consists of the caller's name.
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The Nokia 8810 was the first cell phone without an external antenna whip or stub-antenna, possibly paving the way for iPhones and DROIDs. It also made mobile phones more aesthetically pleasing, with its sliding keypad cover.
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One of the first phones to equip a fully functional web experience and integrate an instant messaging client (AIM) was the Danger Hiptop in 2002, later re-branded the T-Mobile Sidekick. Its messaging features and keyboard made it one of the best selling phones in the deaf community. Also new was an LCD screen that rotated and flipped to reveal a large QWERTY keyboard.
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The HTC EVO 4G from Sprint was the first cellular phone to meet 4G standards, running on the WiMAX network. It was sold powered by Android 2.1 and had one of the largest touchscreen displays, an 8MP camera, HD video capture, HDMI output, Mobile Hotspot capability and HTC Sense.
