Caller ID - History

History

In 1968, Theodore George “Ted” Paraskevakos, while working in Athens, Greece as a communications engineer for SITA, began developing a system to automatically identify a telephone caller to a call recipient. After several attempts and experiments, he developed the method in which the caller's number is transmitted to the called receiver's device. This method was the basis for modern-day Caller ID technology.

From 1969 through 1975, Paraskevakos was issued 20 separate patents related to automatic telephone line identification; they are listed below.

Since Paraskevakos' patents significantly predated all other similar patents, they appear as prior art in later U.S. Patents issued to Kazuo Hashimoto and Carolyn A. Doughty.

In 1971, Paraskevakos, working with Boeing in Huntsville, Alabama, constructed and reduced to practice a transmitter and receiver, representing the world's first prototypes of caller identification devices. They were installed at Peoples' Telephone Company in Leesburg, Alabama and were demonstrated to several telephone companies with great success. These original and historic working models are still in the possession of Paraskevakos.

In the patents related to these devices, Paraskevakos also proposed to send alphanumeric information to the receiving apparatus, such as the caller's name, and also to make feasible banking by telephone. He also proposed to identify the calling telephone by special code (e.g., "PF" for public phone, "HO" for home phone, "OF" for office phone, "PL" for police).

In May 1976, Kazuo Hashimoto, a prolific Japanese inventor with over 1000 patents worldwide, first built a prototype of a caller ID display device that could receive caller ID information. His work on caller ID devices and early prototypes was received in the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History in 2000. U.S. patent 4,242,539, filed originally on May 8, 1976, and a resulting patent re-examined at the patent office by AT&T, was successfully licensed to most of the major telecommunications and computer companies in the world.

Initially, the operating telephone companies wanted to have the caller ID function performed by the central office as a voice announcement and charged on a per-call basis. John Harris, an employee of Northern Telecom's telephone set manufacturing division in London, Ontario promoted the idea of having caller ID as a telephone set display. The telephone was coded ECCS for Enhanced Custom Calling Services. A video of his prototype was used to leverage the feature from the central office to the telephone set.

Early in 1977 Nélio Nicolai, a Brazilian inventor, created a machine capable of identifying and displaying the caller ID, he named it BINA (B identifies number of A or Binary Identifies Number Address). He patented the invention, but lack of support from the Brazilian patent-issuer authority INPI made him pursue the judicial system to effectively collect the royalties from his invention (the lawsuit is still running). He received many proposals to drop his wish for a full patent recognition, but did not accept any. The first commercially available BINAs appeared in 1982 in the Brazilian capital, Brasília. In 1996, Nélio received the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) award for his invention. There is an ongoing debate on how Bell Canada approached Nélio and its former employer (Telebrasília) in the mid-80s asking for technical papers and prototypes (Nélio travelled to Canada). Experimental use of the system happened at the Canadian city of Peterborough, Ontario. Talks ceased and surprisingly, in 1986, Bell Canada announced such tests to the general public, with following commercialization starting in 1988. Nélio says that no royalties were ever collected.

The first market trial for Caller ID and other "Custom Local Area Signaling Services" was conducted by BellSouth as one of the "TouchStar" services on July 7, 1984 in Orlando, Florida. The Lines of Business (marketing) department in BellSouth Services named the service "Caller ID". The other Regional Bell Operating Companies later adopted the name and eventually became the generally accepted name in the US. Planning for the trial was initiated by a team in Bell Laboratories, AT&T Corporation, and Western Electric before the Bell System divestiture, with the participation of Southern Bell. The purpose of these trials was to assess the revenue potential of services that depend on deployment of the common channel signaling network needed to transmit the calling number between originating and terminating central offices. Trial results were analyzed by Bellcore members of the original team.

In 1987, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon Communications) conducted another market trial in Hudson County, New Jersey, which was followed by limited deployment. BellSouth was the first company to deploy caller ID in December 1988 in Memphis, Tennessee, with a full deployment to its nine-state region over the next four years. Bell Atlantic was the second local telephone company to deploy Caller ID in New Jersey's Hudson County. US West Communications (now Qwest/CenturyLink) was the third local telephone company to offer caller ID service in 1989.