Holidays in the world of telecommunications

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

Most important day

Which holiday should be considered the most important? Opinions differ.


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On the one hand, the day of invention of the telephone by Alexander Bell can compete for the first place in the top of the holidays. March 10, 1876, the inventor made the first ever telephone conversation . Bell, in the presence of the Prime Minister of Great Britain 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 a number - in the world at that time there were only two telephones, both in his apartment. However, it was physically impossible to place the phones far from each other: the subscriber was called to the device with a whistle, and the communication range of the first models did not exceed 500 meters.

On the other hand, a telephone is only part of a telecom. Perhaps for the story, the test day of the most common wireless data transfer method is much more significant.



May 7, 1895 Russian physicist Alexander Popov at a meeting of the physico-chemical society demonstratedwireless remote registration of electromagnetic waves from a lightning discharge to the elementary receiver assembled by him. And today in Russia this date is officially considered Radio Day - a professional holiday for workers in all sectors of communications and radio engineering.

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

World Amateur Radio Day also became 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 are celebrating World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, which has replaced the previously celebrated International Telecommunication Day and World Information Society Day. The date is associated with the creation on May 17, 1865 of the International Telegraph Union, subsequently renamed the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

More than 100 years have passed since the creation of ITU before this date was given the status of a holiday. It happened in 1969. At first it was simply called World Telecommunication Day , but in 2006 the holiday 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 using 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, which allows serving up to 30 subscribers and connecting them to land lines.


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July 1, 1991, Prime Minister of Finland Harri Holkeri calledfrom Helsinki to the vice-mayor of Tampere Kaarine Suiono - and this was the first commercial call in the GSM network. It became possible thanks to the efforts of two technological giants - Nokia and Ericsson. The following year, the first GSM phone appeared - the Nokia 1011 model, which weighed 475 grams. She had a monochrome display, a long antenna and a phone 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 Vodafone director Richard Jarvis on his cell phone. The original idea was to use SMS, mainly as a paging service. No one knew how popular this technology would be.

Perhaps, along with the day of the first text message, you can mark the day of the emoticon. However, the smile (in telecom) appeared much earlier - on September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott Falman first proposed using three consecutive characters — a colon, a hyphen, and a closing bracket — in a typed computer text to indicate 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 that year, Google introducedFree Android operating system. In the first phase of deployment, Android received support from 30 companies, including Motorola and HTC. In November 2008, the first Android smartphone appeared on sale - HTC Dream G1, which featured a retractable keyboard.

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 the French writer Phil Marceau, who wrote his first novel in SMS), as well as Mobile Internet Day (celebrated September 30 as International Internet Day).