electric man
...constant. One of the most important communication discoveries is the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell is generally acknowledged as the inventor of the telephone, although a number of other inventors in his day contributed to various aspects of the device. “Bell's most important contribution was his view of the telephone as a means of communication over real distances, using human speech instead of such nonvocal codes as smoke signals, tomtoms, or Morse code.” (Nally) Bell and others discovered that the sounds of speech could be converted to an electrical signal, transmitted over copper wires, and converted back to sound at the receiving device. Today's telephone system links the entire globe. The telephone industry in the United States alone generates about $200 billion yearly in revenues and is the largest segment of the giant communications industry. (http://www.cyberstreet...) People can communicate instantly with each other all around the world. The automobile or car is the most widely used form of transportation. The automobile is a self-propelled, wheeled, steerable vehicle used for transporting people and small cargoes on land. Although the gasoline automobile first appeared in Germany, automotive production on a commercial scale began in France about 1890. Commercial production in the United States began around the turn of the century and was qualitatively inferior to that in Europe. In those days the industry was an assortment of small firms, each turning out a few cars by handicraft methods. “American automobile plants were assembly operations that used parts made by independent suppliers. By contrast, European companies were more likely to build the entire car themselves.” (Normann) The assembly-line technique, first introduced by Henry Ford in 1908, has become virtually universal. Almost all passenger automobiles and most commercial vehicles are made in this way. The technique has been greatly refined so that, instead of the rigid unif...