Are you super gabby?

Did you know that women talk an average of 20,000 words a day.

Closer-mouthed men use only 7,000.

You gabby types can thank Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone.

The telegraph and Morse code allowed short messages to tap their way across electric cable lines. Bell made long conversations from remote locations possible.

Silicon Valley made our phones small and portable.

Bell’s inspiration for his “electrical speech machine” came on a visit to his hearing-impaired mother.

After all, who likes yelling at their mother?

And what mother likes being yelled at?

Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson began working on an idea for the invention that would change the world.

On March 10, 1876, Bell spoke these words into his new invention, “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you.”

Ironically, I use the same words when I call my son’s cellphone when he is upstairs, on his computer, wearing his headphones.

From the telephone’s invention in 1876, the communication business exploded and produced some corporate drama.

In 1911, The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) secretly bought all of Western Union Telegraph Company’s stocks for a “hostile takeover.”

By 1918, around 10 million Bell Telephone systems were in use.

In 1927, the transatlantic service from New York to London began international communication adventures.

The first mobile phone was used in 1946 to connect moving vehicles by radio waves.

What do the words “party line” mean to you?

The upgrade from a switchboard telephone operator to several families sharing a line was progress.

Sharing a phone line had other advantages, like secret eavesdropping.

I heard a funny story from an older lady. She said when she and her siblings would come home, her mother would tell them to be quiet.

Why? The mother was listening in on the party line to her neighbor’s conversations.

One frequent memory was of my parent’s frustration of needing to make phone calls, while Grandmother made sure she got in her 20,000+ words per day.

From Antionio Meucci’s 1854 “voice-communication apparatus” to Bell’s 1876 telephone to the small rectangular cell phone in our pockets, communication has become and will get more sophisticated.

Kate Field, a British reporter who knew Bell, predicted in 1878 that eventually: “While 2 persons, hundreds of miles apart, are talking together, they will actually see each other.”

I think she was right!