I watched a great documentary on NetFlix last night. Walter Shaw was a Bell Laboratories technician/engineer who invented the concepts of call forwarding, touchtone dialing, speakerphone and voice recognition. He invented the answering machine and voicemail. In 1954. he was asked by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to create the Moscow–Washington hotline, the red telephone connecting the two superpowers. After 14 years of having his inventions appropriated by Bell he resigned to pursue his own fortunes. But in those days the Bell System was a Government sponsored monopoly and so Shaw was locked out of the business - it was illegal to create or manufacture any device that connected to a Bell Sytem line. Eventually he turned to creating black boxes for the Mafia in order to hide telephone communications by bookees. His son, embittered by the treatment given his father, turned to a life of crime as a master burglar. Shaws inventions made billions of dollars for Bell and subsequent communications giants .He died penniless in 1996.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 22:25:57 +0000
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