The fascinating history behind answering machines
Today, if you call people and they don’t answer, you just leave a voice note or text on WhatsApp and other similar apps, asking them to either call you back or just telling them why you called. During the last three decades of the 20th century and early 21st century, this task could be done by leaving voicemails. Okay, but what happened prior to that? Well, people used answering machines on their telephones. If you are a new-age kid you may not have ever seen them, but you must have heard stories about them from your parents or grandparents. Turns out, answering machine had a tumultuous history. Let’s find that out, shall we?
Precursor of answering machine
In 1898, a Danish telephone engineer and inventor named Valdemar Poulsen developed magnetic recording, following which he also invented a device called telegraphone. It was the world’s first practical apparatus to use magnetic sound recording and reproduction. Do you know what it did? It used to record telephone conversations on a magnetised wire, which were then used to replay it.
The invention of answering machine
While telegraphone became quite popular around the world, an American physicist named Clarence Hickman wanted to modify this idea and create a device that could record voices of the caller even when the call didn’t happen. He was working for the Bell Laboratories (an industrial research facility owned by tech giant Nokia) in 1930 when he started experimenting with speech pattern recognition and electromechanical switching system based on the earlier magnetic recording technology. By 1934, he had developed a tape-based answering machine that was initially tried and tested in collaboration with AT&T (an American telecommunications company) but was kept hidden from the real world. Both the firms feared that introducing answering machine would lead to fewer actual telephone calls, drowning their profits.
Answering machine is made public
The following year (1935), a German engineer named Willy Muller did something cunning. He referred to William Schergens’ phonographic cylinder-based answering machine and combined the design with Hickman’s idea and launched the first ever automatic answering machine. Not only that, being a Jew himself, he knew that Jews were forbidden to answer the phone during prayers (Sabbath). This is how he marketed his product in his community. It was a three-foot-tall machine that became popular overnight.
Evolution of answering machine
It wasn’t until 1949 that answering machine became part of every household, worldwide. Wondering who made this possible? Well, the credit goes to inventor Joseph Zimmerman and businessman George W. Danner who developed the first commercially successful answering machine called Electronic Secretary. It played both outgoing messages for the caller and recorded incoming messages on a magnetic wire with a capacity of 45 rpm. However, it was Casio who with its TAD (Telephone Answering Device) 400 that made the device a global phenomenon. Later, in 1983, Japanese inventor Dr. Kazuo Hashimoto came up with the world’s first digital TAD. It was called Automatic Digital Telephone Answering.