Bell- All the Way

Today we inaugurated one of the latest Video Conferencing systems , and for the first time communicated with 19 different locations in India, ranging far and wide from Ludhiana to Coimbatore, from Ahmedabad to Bhubaneshwar . All in same real time. At the headquarters at Bangalore, we had meetings ,discussed strategy, decided on important action plans and concluded with an all surmising communication of our BU Manager addressing atleast 300 people from the nook and corner of India. All done in real time. What would have otherwise cost several weeks of laborious travelling and a lot of money, was now over in just 1 hour and just a fraction of the money spent!!

I felt overwhelmed and excited at the distance technology has come.It has come a long way for sure. And today just as I am browsing through the wiki sites, discover, that this very day in 1847, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell was born.

Bell was also called "the father of the deaf" His father, grandfather and brother had all been associated with work on speech and sound and both his mother and wife were deaf! His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices that eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876

The telephone in its earliest form from Bell's labs was a far far cry from what communication is today. With the first invention, users had to have dedicated lines running between their units for transcoding sound. With the invention of multiplexing, and several other technologies, followed by the copper cables, then the fibre optics, the internet and finally today , technology is an indispensible part of our communication.

I read recently that Cisco systems were offering Video conferencing solutions that not only enabled you to see and hear people across the world, but also feel their presenceas if they were really sitting next to you.

Where technology can take communication into, is just anybody's guess. All the way every March 3rd, Bell counts on, what his invention has created for the world.