10 Interesting Phone Facts, from a Company that Relies on Phone Calls

Without telephones, call tracking couldn’t exist.

Although we’ve added many services to our repertoire since inventing call tracking back in 1991, the core of CallSource offline performance data really focuses on your business’ phone calls.

Since phones are such a vital part of call tracking, let’s look at some interesting facts and history of the telephone – all the way back to its conception.

1. Italian innovator Antonio Meucci is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854. Yet, Alexander Graham Bell was granted the first US patent for the telephone in 1876 – two years after he began his research in 1874.¹
2. The American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) was formed in 1885.¹
3. In 1900, there were nearly 600,000 phones in Bell’s telephone system, and by the 1960s, there were more than 80 million phone hookups in the U.S. and 160 million in the world.¹
4. The first mobile phone call was made on April 3, 1973 by a former Motorola inventor, Martin Cooper – who is known as “the father of the cellphone.”²
5. The first cell phones went on sale in the US in 1983, costing about $4,000 each!²
6. CallSource invented call tracking in 1991.
7. Mobile phones have 18 times more bacteria than toilet handles.³ (Gross)
8. As of the end of 2016, over 50% of homes and apartments have only cellphone service. This means under half of households (almost 46%) still have landline phones.⁴
9. By spring of 2017, there were almost 240 million cell phone users in the United States.⁵
10. CallSource has tracked over 1 billion phone calls since 1995.

Interested in call tracking for your business? Speak to one of our representatives today.

1. https://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/150/1870.xhtml
2. https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/388974/40-years-of-the-mobile-phone-Top-20-facts
3. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1298057/Mobile-phones-18-times-bacteria-toilet-handle.html
4. https://nypost.com/2017/05/04/why-nearly-46-percent-of-household-still-have-landlines/
5. https://www.statista.com/statistics/231612/number-of-cell-phone-users-usa/