Answering Services

Commercial answering services date back to the 1920’s. The earliest services were provided for doctors, with the first one likely being Mrs Smith’s Doctors Exchange, which began in Virginia in 1923. Callers instead of hearing ringing forever indicaating that the perrson dialed was not available could benefit by a live human telling them the person dialed was not available. The only advantage was being able to leave a message which may or may not get delivered or replied to.

Answering Machines

Various devices by numerous inventors date to the early 1930’s. The first to gain any commercial success was the Electronic Secretary created by Joseph Zimmerman in 1949. It used the then state-of-the-art technology of a 45 rpm record player for announcements and a wire recorder for message capture and playback. This was followed by the Ansafone in 1960, the first machine offered in the U.S. and Code-a-Phone in 1966. By 1984 the devices reached 1 Million in sales.

Code-a-Phone 700, 1966

Voice Mail

The term voicemail was coined by inventor Gordon Mathew (Voice Message Express) for their introduction of the first US-wide service in 1980. The key development here is digitizing voice with a computer allowing access to messages by phone anywhere. Gordon died in 2002 and if you call you will get a message that he is not available at this time but to leave a message…