Telephone

The invention that got people TALKING

Although who invented it is still debated, everyone agrees that the telephone revolutionized communication.

Did you know? Bell also invented a metal detector, which he used to try to find a bullet inside President James A. Garfield after he was shot in 1881.

Bell’s telephone

Seeking to improve the telegraph in 1875, Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell stumbled on a discovery of far greater importance: He realized that sounds could travel Along the telegrAph wires, and be heard in another room. Bell’s first message to his assistant Thomas Watson was “Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!”

Bell’s interest in sound and communication was inspired by his mother and wife, who were both deaf.

It paved the way for…

The telephone exchange meant that more than one phone could be connected along the same line, less than a year after the phone was invented. This version of Bell’s phone was made to demonstrate the invention to Queen Victoria of the UK in 1878.

In 1889, a coin-operated pay phone was installed at the Hartford Bank in Hartford, Connecticut.

Bell began working on his idea and patented it in 1876, since he knew other inventors were working on similar designs. His early phones featured a lever to call the other phone on the line, and a receiver that functioned as both an earpiece to hear the person on the other end and a mouthpiece to talk to them (though separate ear- and mouthpieces were soon developed). They were a roaring success.

By the way... I patented a device much like a telephone five years before Bell did. But I was too poor to pay the $10 fee to renew my patent, so I lost it.

HOW Early telephones used a thin metal disk that vibrated when someone IT WO R KS spoke into the transmitter, making fluctuations in a layer of carbon granules. This varied the electric current, provided by a battery, which then traveled across the telephone line to the receiver. The electric current caused the carbon grains in the receiver to vibrate and copy the original sound.

Carbon granules

Transmitter

Telephone line

Meucci constructed a telephonelike device at home to talk to his wife, who was ill at the time.

Mad Meucci

As Bell’s telephone industry took off, a few of his rival inventors argued that he had taken their ideas. Among these was the Italian antonio Meucci, who in 1860 had demonstrated his “teletrofono,” which Bell had seen. Meucci was in the process of suing Bell, but his legal claim ended when he died in 1889.

Receiver

How it changed the worl d By turning sound into electrical signals and back again, the telephone enabled people to talk to one another over long distances for the first time. It has become the most widely used communication device on Earth.

In 1963, the first electronic pushbutton telephones were offered by bell telephone, the company founded by Alexander Graham Bell.

Modern smartphones feature touch screens and cameras, and can connect to the Internet.