One hundred and thirty-seven years ago yesterday, the first telephone call took place. Any guess as to who placed the call and what was said? (The answers are at the end of this post.)
In honor of this most auspicious of audio anniversaries, we polled nearly 2,000 people to determine how our collective phone habits have (and haven’t) changed over the years.
Some of the results of the poll may surprise you. For example, 60 percent of people said they had at least four phone numbers on their business cards. And text messaging is on the rise: four of every five people we surveyed use SMS in business communications.
For all the data, check out our infographic (click on the image to open it full-size in a new window).
With short messages (SMS stands for Short Message Service) becoming so popular, it’s little wonder that a third of our survey respondents think we’ll abbreviate our communications even further in the decades to come. In a strange twist, an even greater number – 39 percent of the total – think we’ll rely on robots to communicate for us.
Pixar’s Wall-E
(Sounds like the future as imagined by Wall-E.)
Feel free to share with us how you think human communication will change in the next 137 years. We at RingCentral are doing our part to reimagine business phone systems – but even more change is no doubt on the horizon!
Trivia answers: Alexander Graham Bell and “Mr. Watson [Bell’s assistant] – come here – I want to see you.”
Originally published Mar 11, 2013, updated Jun 17, 2024
