Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

by Vaclav Smil

Perhaps the best metric for quantifying the gains in communication is the cost of an international phone call. Again, there can be no comparison for the entire 20th century: intercity phone service was available in parts of the United States since the early 1880s, but the first transcontinental call (from San Francisco to New York) was made only in January 1915 and the first trans-Atlantic call (from London to New York) only in March 1926. Starting with the typical charge for an international call in 1930, the relative cost fell by 90% in 1972, to less than 1% in 1993 and to just 0.1% in the year 2000 (OECD 2013), a 1,000-fold decline in 70 years. And during the first 15 years of the 21st century the cost fell by another order of magnitude (Figure 7.2). And in the era of e-mail, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Viber, or Google Hangout, when an individual can reach simultaneously, and virtually cost-free, large numbers of people anywhere in the world, waiting for an operator to connect an expensive intercontinental call on an indistinct line with a distinct delay is a distant memory.