A brief history of the telephone

The basic change that a single invention brought to the world is exactly the telephone. The benefit of this invention is talking to loved ones far away with the ease and comfort of home. In this modern world of mobile phones and Internet telephony, the fundamental change in society that occurred with the invention of the telephone is taken for granted.

In the old school days, children were taught to tie two cans together using a thin wire and holding them well apart from each other to allow sound to flow from one end to the other. This is a basic phone you see in the Flintstones cartoons but the real ones require electricity and components.

This is a completely different system used on ships in the form of long pipes in the ship’s bridge that could be led down to the engine room. The electric telegraph was invented in the early 19th century and constantly transmitted messages of all kinds. There was always a desire to improve the telegraph. Knowledge of sound waves through teaching deaf students gave Alexander Graham Bell an idea to invent the telephone.

Bell was credited as a gentleman and inventor of the telephone. He nearly lost that honor when Bell and Elisha Gray, another noted inventor, applied for his patent for the telephone on the same day, February 14, 1876. Unfortunately, Bell’s attorney and the patent office clerk who had served in the War Civil and first conspired to register Bell’s patent. The patent examiner stopped the prosecution when he realized that both applications were similar until they could be proven. Bell demonstrated the technique devised by Gray and was granted the patent. According to historians, Gray would have been considered the inventor of the telephone if Bell hadn’t proved it first.

Just a year after Bell’s patent was filed, the techniques of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson led directly to the first commercial telephone services. Other leading scientists before Bell, such as Johann Reis of Germany and Antonio Meucci of Italy, had also demonstrated prototype telephones, but their techniques were not very advanced.

The citizens of Boston first benefited in 1877 with the installation of the first telephone. Telephone switchboards were quickly invented that allowed subscribers to talk to any phone connected to the same set of phone lines. The first entered service in 1878 at New Haven. After the first three years of commercial telephones, the United States had almost thousands of telephones. With the invention of the telephone switchboard, subscribers needed a way to connect with each other effectively without connecting to an operator.

Early telephone exchanges were locally based and a subscriber could only talk to another subscriber in his own exchange if he asked an operator to make the call. Long distance calls could not be made from home. An appointment was needed with the central telephone office that could transmit over longer distances.

The actual telephone device used in the home underwent significant development in the 1920s when Western Electric developed a telephone that consisted of a handset that included an earpiece and a microphone. This allowed subscribers to talk on the move for the first time. The Bell 102 model was the first development of this type of telephone which is still popular today.

Telephones did not change much after the 1930s until the introduction of digital phones and telephone exchanges in the 1960s. By 2005, mobile phone connections in many developed countries dwarfed fixed-line connections.