Search results
History of the telephone in the United States. The telephone played a major communications role in American history from the 1876 publication of its first patent by Alexander Graham Bell onward.
In 1915, when Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson were asked to re-enact their famous first phone conversation, they became part of a wider effort to demonstrate the emergence of a single ...
- Bell's Biography
- From Telegraph to Telephone
- Talk with Electricity
- "Mr. Watson, Come Here"
- The Telephone Network Is Born
- Exchanges and Rotary Dialing
- Pay Phones
- Touch-Tone Phones
- Cordless Phones
- Cell Phones
Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was immersed in the study of sound from the beginning. His father, uncle, and grandfather were authorities on elocution and speech therapy for the deaf. It was understood that Bell would follow in the family footsteps after finishing college. But after Bell's two other brot...
The telegraphand telephone are both wire-based electrical systems. Alexander Graham Bell's success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph. When he began experimenting with electrical signals, the telegraph had been an established means of communication for some 30 years. Although a highly successful syst...
By October 1874, Bell's research had progressed to the extent that he could inform his future father-in-law, Boston attorney Gardiner Greene Hubbard, about the possibility of a multiple telegraph. Hubbard, who resented the absolute control then exerted by the Western Union Telegraph Company, instantly saw the potential for breaking such a monopoly ...
On June 2, 1875, while experimenting with the harmonic telegraph, the men discovered that sound could be transmitted over a wire completely by accident. Watson was trying to loosen a reed that had been wound around a transmitter when he plucked it by accident. The vibration produced by that gesture traveled along the wire into a second device in th...
Bell patented his device on March 7, 1876, and it quickly began to spread. By 1877, construction of the first regular telephone line from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts, had been completed. By the end of 1880, there were over 49,000 telephones in the United States. The following year, telephone service between Boston and Providence, Rhode Is...
The first regular telephone exchange was established in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878. Early telephones were leased in pairs to subscribers. The subscriber was required to put up his own line to connect with another. In 1889, Kansas City undertaker Almon B. Strowger invented a switch that could connect one line to any of 100 lines by using relays...
In 1889, the coin-operated telephone was patented by William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut. Gray's payphone was first installed and used in the Hartford Bank. Unlike pay phones today, users of Gray's phone paid after they had finished their call. Payphones proliferated along with the Bell System. By the time the first phone booths were installed in...
Researchers at Western Electric, AT&T's manufacturing subsidiary, had experimented with using tones rather than pulses to trigger telephone connections since the early 1940s, but it wasn't until 1963 that dual-tone multifrequency signaling, which uses the same frequency as speech, was commercially viable. AT&T introduced it as Touch-Tone dialing an...
In the 1970s, the very first cordless phones were introduced. In 1986, the Federal Communications Commission granted the frequency range of 47 to 49 MHz for cordless phones. Granting a greater frequency range allowed cordless phones to have less interference and need less power to run. In 1990, the FCC granted the frequency range of 900 MHz for cor...
The earliest mobile phones were radio-controlled units designed for vehicles. They were expensive and cumbersome, and had extremely limited range. First launched by AT&T in 1946, the network would slowly expand and become more sophisticated, but it never was widely adopted. By 1980, it had been replaced by the first cellular networks. Research on w...
- Mary Bellis
Philipp Reis, 1861, constructed the first telephone, today called the Reis telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876. Elisha Gray, 1876, designed a telephone using a water microphone in Highland Park, Illinois.
People also ask
What role did the telephone play in American history?
When was the first telephone invented?
When did telephones become dials?
Who founded AT&T telephone company?
On February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell applied for a U.S. patent for the telephone. On March 7, 1876, Bell was awarded U.S. patent 174,465. This patent is often referred to as the most valuable ever issued by the U.S. Patent Office, as it described not only the telephone instrument but also the concept of a telephone system.
Nov 9, 2009 · Alexander Graham Bell, best known for his invention of the telephone, revolutionized communication as we know it. His interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his...
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone leading to a dispute with Elisha Gray. This guide provides access to materials related to "Invention of the Telephone" in the Chronicling America digital collection of historic newspapers. "How Prof. Bell invented the telephone." July 9, 1899.
