Products the Smartphone Made Almost Useless

AT&T built a working answering machine in 1934 and deliberately shelved it. The 10,000-step target came from a product name, not a study. And civilian GPS exists because a passenger plane drifted off course and was shot down. Here are 10 objects your phone replaced, and the strange histories behind them. The Rolodex — short for "rolling index" — came from Arnold Neustadter's Zephyr American Corporation in Brooklyn, solving the problem that address books can't be re-sorted by giving every contact a notched card on a removable rail. The first telephone directory was printed in New Haven, Connecticut in February 1878, listed around 50 subscribers, and contained no phone numbers because you asked an operator by name; business listings on yellow paper followed in 1886, and Britain's Yell printed its final paper edition in January 2019. Levi Hutchins built himself an alarm clock in Concord, New Hampshire in 1787 that could only ring at 4 a.m., never patented it, and adjustable mechanical alarms followed in the 1870s; civilian clock production was halted during the Second World War and resumed when workers began oversleeping. The 10,000-step goal originated with the manpo-kei, a Japanese pedometer marketed after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and a 2019 JAMA Internal Medicine study led by I-Min Lee found mortality benefits appearing well below that figure and levelling off around 7,500 steps. Encyclopaedia Britannica first appeared in Scotland in 1768 and announced the end of print editions in March 2012, having earlier declined to put its content on CD — Microsoft instead licensed Funk & Wagnalls and launched Encarta in 1993, which Wikipedia later displaced. Valdemar Poulsen patented wire sound recording in 1898, and Bell Labs engineer Clarence Hickman built a working tape answering machine in 1934 that AT&T shelved, reportedly fearing recorded calls would reduce phone use; the FCC's 1968 Carterfone decision opened the network to third-party devices. The handheld electric torch was patented around 1899 by David Misell, who sold the rights to Conrad Hubert of what became Eveready, and in December 2013 the FTC settled with the maker of a popular Android flashlight app over undisclosed data sharing. Alexander Bain patented image transmission over telegraph wire in 1843, 33 years before the telephone, and fax machines remained in widespread use in the UK's NHS and in Japanese government into recent years. Intel's 4004, designed for Japanese calculator maker Busicom and released in November 1971 with around 2,300 transistors, became the first general-purpose microprocessor after Intel bought back non-calculator rights. And civilian GPS was opened up after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down over Soviet airspace on September 1, 1983, with deliberate accuracy degradation finally switched off in May 2000. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 — Number 10: The Rolodex 1:25 — Number 9: The Phone Book 2:45 — Number 8: The Alarm Clock 4:05 — Number 7: The Pedometer 5:25 — Number 6: The Printed Encyclopedia 6:45 — Number 5: The Answering Machine 8:05 — Number 4: The Flashlight 9:20 — Number 3: The Fax Machine 10:40 — Number 2: The Pocket Calculator 12:00 — Number 1: The Standalone GPS 13:30 — Outro ❓ QUESTIONS THIS VIDEO ANSWERS What does Rolodex stand for? Who invented the Rolodex? What was in the first phone book? Why are the Yellow Pages yellow? Can you opt out of phone book deliveries? Who invented the alarm clock? Why were alarm clocks rationed in World War II? Where did the 10,000 steps goal come from? How many steps a day do you actually need? When did Encyclopaedia Britannica stop printing? Did Britannica turn down Microsoft? Why did Encarta fail? Who invented the answering machine? Why did AT&T hide the answering machine? What was the Carterfone decision? Why is it called a flashlight? What happened with flashlight apps and privacy? Is the fax machine older than the telephone? Why does Japan still use fax machines? What was the Intel 4004? How did Intel get the rights to the microprocessor? Why was GPS made available to civilians? What was Selective Availability? 🔔 Subscribe for more countdown explainers like this one. 💬 Which of these do you still own? 👇 #Technology #History #DidYouKnow