| For over a
hundred years, we have had this wonderful communication device. For
thousands of years previous to that, if you wanted to talk to
someone, well, you had to go over and talk to them, unless you were
good at making smoke signals, or reflecting sunlight off of a shiny
pot or pan, or just yellin' across the hollar. Although the concept
of sending signals over a wire was well known, we can thank
inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison (among
others) for electrifying these signals and giving us the telegraph,
and then the telephone. This has worked just peachy for over a
century, and thanks to improvements to this tried-and-true design,
our "land line" (or corded) phones have reached an unprecedented
level of sound quality and reliability. But well-meaning people
can't leave a good idea alone. The first concept of a wireless
telephone was patented in 1908, and this type of phone has been
around since 1945, but they were limited in range until Bell Labs
invented base stations, (cells) in 1947.
The invention languished for decades,
presumably because Bell Telephone was busy milking all the money
they could from their monopoly, charging us rent every month on a
device we were not allowed to actually purchase. The first true
mobile phones, or cell phones, were introduced in 1984, the
distinction from radio telephones being their ability to switch from
one base station to another as the user moved about, known as a
"handoff". Although mobile phones have evolved from a shoe-box sized
contraption that only carried phone calls to a palm-sized gadget
that will entertain you with music, video games, and photos of Aunt
Bessie's new cat, they still have one problem that hasn't been
fixed: the reception still sucks! As you travel, you and your phone
move from one reception area to another. Although these areas, or
cells, are typically 10 miles square, the shape of the reception
area is actually round, due to the nature of the way radio waves
emanate from the antenna. So these areas tend to overlap along
adjoining edges and leave gaps in other areas. And if you think
you'll have great reception when you have five bars (a gauge of
signal strength with a 0 value representing no signal strength and a
5 representing the strongest signal) think again, because (as
reported at Wired.com) the bars are meaningless when it comes to the
sound quality or signal strength of your call! This is because you
actually have two signals that your phone receives-the primary
signal, and a multi-path signal that will screw up that call you
were making to discuss who will win American Idol, or what to have
for dinner, or some other terribly important subject. But that's not
all the fun!
It turns out drivers on cell phones make more mistakes than drunk
drivers, according to a University of Utah study, so that call
you're making about whether to have steak or chicken for dinner puts
you and everyone else on the road at extreme risk! But at least you
have one hand on the wheel, right? Not if you're sending a text
message to Aunt Bessie thanking her for the pictures of her cat. So
those high- tech wizards have managed to make a dangerous gadget
even more dangerous. Cell phones are not the greenest devices
either.
Unlike those good old ugly Western
Electric land line phones that last 20, 30 or more years, (the type
that you can kick around the room with no damage, after that cute
chick at the bar gives you her phone number that turns out to be the
number for Home Depot) cell phones are cheaply made, unreliable, and
typically get replaced after a year or two. At present, there are
500 million used cell phones in America alone, and every cell phone
in the dump adds fun substances like lead, mercury, and arsenic to
the soil, which eventually ends up in the water table, and then in
your tap water. Ain't technology great?
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