Dane Valdemar Poulsen (1869-1942) shaped a surprising amount of the modern world with the invention of magnetically recorded sound in 1898. It was an incredibly useful innovation that has been used in tape recordings, hard disks, floppy disks, and credit cards. It also led him to create, in 1904, the world's first "telephone answering device."
Modern society relies on communication tools such as the telephone to function, and today it is very unusual to encounter a telephone that does not have some form of answering phone or voicemail. After its invention in 1876, the telephone became a world- changing tool, allowing anyone in the world to have a conversation with anyone else, immediately. It was only a matter of time before somebody had the idea for an answering machine.
Poulsen's magnetic wire recording device was initially used in the answering machine but later versions used magnetic tape to record the telephone message. Today, equipment tends to use solid-state memory storage. The first digital answer-phone was invented in the United States by Kazuo Hashimoto in 1983.
Telephones are, of course, intrinsically rude devices that pay no respect to normal methods of adult communication, and they interrupt whatever activity is going on. The answering machine—along with its related modern counterparts of voicemail, call registers, and text messages—gives people some relief from this impolite badgering, by allowing them to know who has been trying to talk to them and deciding whether they want to talk back.
