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Note: AT&T developed coaxial cable in 1920 yet still considers twisted pair copper an adequate infrastructure for delivering their new network services to the home.

from: 3Screen.net (via AT&T press release)

AT&T Receives Technology & Engineering Emmy Award

Company Recognized for Helping to Shape Today's Entertainment and Broadband Industries with Invention of Coaxial Cable Technology

Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7, 2008

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) announced today that it will be awarded a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. AT&T will receive the award for its invention of coaxial cable technology, which delivered the first broadband transmission medium nearly 75 years ago.

AT&T will receive the award this evening at a ceremony held in conjunction with the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The late Lloyd Espenschied and the late Herman Affel, engineers at AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories, were the inventors and founding fathers of the broadband coaxial cable system. A U.S. patent for their invention was granted in 1934, and the technology was used two years later to deliver the first television signals. Coaxial cable ultimately was deployed around the world to enable transmission of large volumes of voice calls and video content.

"We are pleased to be recognized with a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for the invention of this landmark technology, which revolutionized the way that voice and video services were delivered for decades to come," said Dave Belanger, chief scientist at AT&T Labs. "AT&T Labs is proud to follow in the footsteps of Lloyd Espenschied and Herman Affel today as we continue to drive innovation in the communications and entertainment industries."

The coaxial invention is one chapter in a long history of innovation at AT&T Labs, which includes thousands of patents issued or pending worldwide and has a heritage that has produced seven Nobel Prizes. Today, the company's researchers remain at the forefront of innovation in networking, communications and entertainment applications. AT&T has developed and deployed a range of new-generation technologies within its unsurpassed network, which today supports more than 13.4 petabytes of Internet Protocol (IP) traffic on any given business day — the equivalent of more than 2.1 megabytes for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Additionally, AT&T is driving new innovations in the delivery of video, data and voice applications and is building on the power and flexibility of IP. With its AT&T U-verseSM IPTV platform, the company is delivering new video entertainment features and capabilities that are unmatched in the marketplace. And with the convergence platforms developed at AT&T, the company is quickly integrating its wireless and wireline networks to enable more seamless communications and content delivery across the three screens that matter most to customers: the wireless device, the personal computer and the television.

History of the Coaxial Cable
In the early 1920s, AT&T engineers recognized the need to carry high-frequency signals across long distances, so Espenschied and Affel worked for years to develop a new kind of broadband wire system that could transmit a continuous range of high frequencies over long distances. The men discovered that they could not only transmit voice over distances but also reduce frequency losses and prevent outside interference by using a coaxial conductor — a copper cable lined with two concentric cylinders of conducting material separated by air.

Espenschied and Affel jointly applied for a patent on a broadband coaxial cable system of transmission in 1929. The invention was disclosed in a prize-winning paper published in the American Institute of Electrical Engineers magazine in October 1934; their U.S. Patent No. 1,835,031 was granted that same year. Coaxial cable is recognized as the first broadband transmission medium, which initially carried voice signals. In 1936, the first transmission of TV pictures on coaxial cable was delivered from the Summer Olympics, in Berlin, to the German city of Leipzig. That same year, coaxial cable paved the way for television by allowing video from NBC's New York studio to be sent to a transmitter on the Empire State Building.

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