@Mark Ollig
As 2025 comes to an end, I’ve been looking back on the columns published over the past year.
As 2025 comes to an end, I’ve been looking back on the columns published over the past year.
They contain a mix of technological history and events, along with a few personal experiences.
“Tomorrow is Yesterday and Today is the Future” (Jan. 3) looked back to 1925 and the predictions made about life in 2025.
Some proved surprisingly accurate, while others fell short.
“The wireless ‘Aerial Telegraph’” (Jan. 10) described how Dr. Mahlon Loomis tried to harness atmospheric electricity in the 1860s to send wireless telegraph signals.
He demonstrated the idea with a kite‑and‑wire experiment between two Virginia mountaintops in the mid‑1860s, marking an early effort to transmit signals without telegraph wires.
“The first national radio broadcast of a presidential inauguration” (Jan. 24) described President Calvin Coolidge’s March 4, 1925, inauguration.
It was the first nationwide live radio broadcast, carried by more than 20 radio stations, including a WCCO hookup in Minneapolis.
For many, it was the first national political event they heard live.
“Birth of the telephone directory” (Feb. 21) traced how George Willard Coy’s New Haven exchange produced the first single‑page cardboard directory in 1878.
It listed about 50 subscribers without numbers, so callers relied on the operator to connect them.
In the 1948 Winsted Telephone Company directory, people were identified by party‑line codes instead of street addresses, like Winsted subscriber Glenard Gatz at “10, ring 18.”
“Captain Kirk’s communicator inspired Cooper’s vision” (April 4) explored how science fiction inspired the real-world creation of Martin Cooper’s first handheld cellular phone in 1973.
“Western Electric’s model 1317 magneto wall phone” (April 11) focused on earlier telephone technology, including iron wire and hand-cranked, battery-powered magneto wall phones.
“The Webb Looks Into the Universe” (May 9) explored the James Webb Space Telescope and its technology for producing deep-space images near the time of the Big Bang.
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched Dec. 25, 2021, moved into a looping “halo” orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point, a stable spot in space about one million miles from Earth.
The articles “The Leich Dial System Kept the Town Talking,” part one (June 13) and part two (June 19), explored the Leich (pronounced “like”) telephone switching system used by the Winsted Telephone Company from 1960 to 1986.
The Leich was replaced Dec. 6, 1986, by the Digital Multiplex System-10 (DMS-10), an advanced digital call-processing switch employing pulse-code modulation and time-division multiplexing.
“Voices of Light Cross the Atlantic on Glass Strands” (July 3) recounted the story of installing the Trans-Atlantic Telephone-8 (TAT-8) fiber-optic submarine communications cable.
Laser technology was used for the first time Dec. 14, 1988, to transmit calls between the US and Europe through the TAT-8 fiber-optic cable.
“The mission to save Skylab” (July 11) showed how ingenuity and engineering judgment rescued America’s first space station after launch.
“Looking at Winsted’s early telephone network” (Aug. 14) revisited the town’s early communications system from the 1910s through the 1930s.
In the early 1910s, telephone poles lined Main Avenue West in Winsted, each holding several wooden crossarms.
These eight-foot crossarms were bolted and braced to the poles, with rows of glass insulators screwed onto wooden pins.
Galvanized iron wires, usually in parallel pairs, sat on the insulators.
In the early days of telephony, wooden magneto telephones transmitted voice audio using an earth-ground connection as the return path to complete the circuit.
They relied on two or three dry-cell batteries for powering the carbon transmitter (microphone) for audio transmission.
A hand-cranked magneto generator in the telephone was used to produce the 70 to 100 volts AC ringing current to signal an operator or other phones on the same line.
“A telephone office visit ‘ringing’ with nostalgia” (Aug. 21) described my personally meaningful return to the Winsted Telephone Company office after more than 30 years.
“A Local Telephone Company’s ‘Giant Leap’ into Fiber Optics” (Sept. 4) recounted how Winsted modernized its long-distance telephone network.
In 1988, Winsted Telephone Company replaced its copper toll cable with single-mode fiber-optic cable interfaced with an NEC RC-28D digital multiplexer using laser diodes for transmission.
“Nightly glow: from phone booths to smartphone screens” (Sept. 11) recalled Winsted payphones from 1950 to the late 1970s, including an Airlight outdoor phone booth on Main Street whose interior glowed at night.
“AI’s benefits, drawbacks, and safety concerns” (Sept. 25) discussed a Pew Research Center survey from Sept. 17.
Pew reported 76% of people felt it was extremely or very important to know if AI or a human had created the content they were reading, yet 53% admitted they were not confident in their ability to tell the difference.
“Lunar Orbiter 1: NASA’s first Moon survey mission” (Oct. 30) explained how NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 helped map the Moon in 1966.
The mission mapped the Moon to help choose Apollo landing sites, and one standout image was the famous Earth photo taken from lunar orbit, digitally enhanced in 2008.
“AI helps retired telecom tech” (Nov. 13) described my experience turning to ChatGPT for assistance when my LG smart TV’s YouTube TV app failed.
The columns “Revisiting the ‘Mother of All Demos,’ part one” (Dec. 4) and “He Gave Us a Look at ‘Tomorrow’” (Dec. 11) explored Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” Dec. 9, 1968.
The event showcased his work at the Stanford Research Institute, where he demonstrated display screens, keyboards, a mouse, hyperlinking, and video conferencing.
Engelbart and his team developed real-time text editing and on-screen collaboration that helped shape modern word processing and teamwork tools.
In 1968, most computing ran on large mainframes.
Punch cards were the primary input method, and text-only display terminals were also used.
Output was often printed on wide-line printers that commonly produced 132 columns per page.
Today is my 52nd and final column of 2025.
Thank you for joining me on these weekly journeys.
Happy New Year, everyone.
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A composite of photos from previous articles assembled by Mark Ollig. All photos are archival or personal except for the header banner and one CONAD illustration, which are illustrative elements created using ChatGPT 5.2. Photo composite by Mark Ollig. |
