Answering machine

The answering machine, answerphone or message machine, also known as the telephone answering machine (or TAM) in the UK and some Commonwealth countries, ansaphone or ansafone (from a trade name), or telephone answering device (TAD), is used for answering telephones and recording callers' messages.

Unlike voicemail, which can be a centralized or networked system that covers, and mostly extends, similar functions, an answering machine is set up in the user's premises alongside — or incorporated within — the user's land-line telephone. Unlike operator messaging the caller does not talk to a human.

As land lines become less important, due to the shift to cell phone technology, and as unified communications matures, the installed base of TADs is shrinking.

Most 20th century answering machines used magnetic recording which Valdemar Poulsen invented in 1898. The creation of the first practical automatic answering device for telephones, however, is in dispute. Clarence Hickman worked for Bell Laboratories from 1930 where he developed methods for the magnetic recording and working on the recognition of speech patterns and electromechanical switching systems. In 1934, he developed a tape-based answering machine which phone company AT&T, as the owner of Bell Laboratories, kept under wraps for years for fear that an answering machine would result in fewer telephone calls. Many claim it was William Muller in 1935, but it could have been created already in 1931 by William Schergens whose device used phonographic cylinders.Ludwig Blattner promoted a telephone answering machine in 1929 based on his Blattnerphone magnetic recording technology. In 1935 inventor Benjamin Thornton developed a machine to record voice messages from the caller. The device reportedly also was able to keep track of the time the recordings were made. Although many sources maintain that he invented it in 1935, Thornton had actually filed a patent in 1930 (Number 1831331) for this machine, which utilized a phonographic record as the recording medium.

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