Holidays in the world of telecommunications

The telecommunications industry is responsible for a wide range of services: fixed and mobile communications, the Internet, television, etc. And in all these areas, individual innovators, scientific laboratories and entire corporations have made many important discoveries for the industry over the century. Each achievement deserves a separate holiday, but today we will talk about the most important and memorable dates for the communications industry.

Most important day

What holiday should be considered the most important? Opinions diverge.


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On the one hand, for the first place in the top of holidays, the day of the invention of the telephone by Alexander Bell can fight. On March 10, 1876, the inventor made the first-ever telephone conversation . Bell, in the presence of the British Prime Minister and other dignitaries of the United Kingdom, told his assistant by telephone: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you ”(“ Mr. Watson, come in, I want to see you ”).

To call, Bell did not even have to dial the number - in the world at that time there were only two telephone sets, and both in his apartment. However, it was impossible to physically place phones far apart: the subscriber to the device was called a whistle, and the communication range of the first models did not exceed 500 meters.

On the other hand, the telephone is only part of the telecom. Perhaps the history of the most common method of wireless data transmission is much more significant for history.



On May 7, 1895, at a meeting of the Physico-Chemical Society, the Russian physicist demonstrated wireless remote recording of electromagnetic oscillations from a lightning strike to an elementary receiver he had assembled. And today in Russia, this date is officially considered the Day of Radio - a professional holiday for workers in all branches of communications and radio engineering.

However, Radio Day, associated with the achievement of Popov, is not celebrated around the world. On February 13, 2011, the UNESCO General Conference approved its holiday - World Radio Day . It is celebrated in honor of the first broadcast of the station "UN Radio", broadcast in the headquarters of the United Nations in 1946.

The International Day of Amateur Radio has become a specialized holiday. It falls on April 18 - on this day in 1925, the International Amateur Radio Union was created in Paris.


Delegates to the first conference of the International Telegraph Union.

Today we celebrate World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, which replaced the previously celebrated International Telecommunications Day and World Information Society Day. The date is associated with the creation of the International Telegraph Union on May 17, 1865, which was later renamed the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

More than 100 years have passed since the creation of the ITU, before this date was given holiday status. It happened in 1969. At first, it was simply called World Telecommunication Day , but in 2006 it was renamed, adding the mention of the information society.

Memorable dates and turning points

The list of smaller occasions for the holiday is much more diverse.


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On April 3, 1973, engineer Martin Cooper made the first call on a prototype Motorola mobile phone. The weight of the phone was 1.15 kilograms, length - 22.5 centimeters. The call was made from the top of the 50-story Alliance Capital Building in New York, where a base station was installed, allowing it to serve up to 30 subscribers and connect them to landlines.


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On July 1, 1991, Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri made a call from Helsinki to the Vice Mayor of Tampere, Kaarine Suiono, and this was the first commercial call on the GSM network. It became possible thanks to the efforts of two technology giants - Nokia and Ericsson. Next year, the first GSM-phone appeared - the Nokia 1011 model, which weighed 475 grams. She had a monochrome display, a long antenna and a telephone book with 99 numbers.

On December 3, 1992, the first SMS was sent. Engineer Neil Papworth wrote “merry Christmas” on a computer and sent a message to the mobile phone of Vodafone director Richard Jarvis. The initial idea was to use SMS, mainly as a paging service. Nobody guessed how much this technology would be in demand.

Perhaps, together with the day of the first text message, you can celebrate the day of the emoticon. However, the smiley (in telecom) appeared much earlier - on September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott Fulman first proposed to use three characters in a text typed on a computer, consecutive - a colon, a hyphen and a closing bracket - to designate a "smiling face".

The era of modern touchscreen smartphones began on January 9, 2007, when Steve Jobs demonstrated the first iPhone.

And on November 5 of the same year, Google introduced the free Android operating system. In the first stage of the deployment, Android received support from 30 companies, including Motorola and HTC. In November 2008, the first Android smartphone, the HTC Dream G1, featured with a sliding keyboard, was launched.

New holidays

The industry is changing, new technologies are emerging, and with them new reasons to celebrate the holiday. Now we already have World Emoji Day (July 17), International Day without mobile phones (it was proposed to be held on February 6 by French writer Phil Marceau, who wrote the first novel in SMS), and also the day of the mobile Internet (celebrated September 30 as International Internet Day).