The telephone: a brief history

During the 1870s, two well-known inventors independently designed devices that could transmit sound through electrical cables. Those inventors were Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray. Both devices were registered at the patent office within hours of each other. A bitter legal battle over the invention of the telephone ensued, which Bell subsequently won.

The telegraph and the telephone are very similar in concept, and it was through Bell’s attempts to improve the telegraph that he succeeded with the telephone.

The telegraph had been a highly successful communication system for about 30 years before Bell began experimenting. The main problem with the telegraph was that it used Morse code and was limited to sending and receiving one message at a time. Bell had a good understanding of the nature of sound and music. This allowed him to perceive the possibility of transmitting more than one message on the same cable at the same time. Bell’s idea was not new, others before him had imagined a multiple telegraph. Bell offered his own solution, the “Harmonic Telegraph”. This was based on the principle that musical notes could be sent simultaneously on the same wire, if those notes differed in pitch.

By the latter part of 1874, Bell’s experiment had progressed sufficiently to inform his close relatives of the possibility of a multiple telegraph. Bell’s future father-in-law, attorney Gardiner Green Hubbard, saw an opportunity to break the monopoly exercised by the Western Union Telegraph Company. It gave Bell the financial backing he needed to continue his multi-telegraph development work. However, Bell failed to mention that he and his accomplice, another brilliant young electrician Thomas Watson, were developing an idea that he came up with over the summer. This idea was to create a device that could transmit the human voice electrically.

Bell and Watson continued to work on the harmonic telegraph at the insistence of Hubbard and some other financial backers. During March 1875, Bell met a man named Joseph Henry without Hubbard’s knowledge. Joseph Henry was the respected director of the Smithsonian Institution. He listened carefully to Bell’s ideas and offered words of encouragement. Both Bell and Watson were stimulated by Henry’s views and continued their work with even greater enthusiasm and determination. In June 1875 they realized that their goal of creating a device that could electrically transmit speech would soon be realized. His experiments had shown that different tones would vary the strength of an electric current in a wire.

Now all they had to do was build a device with a suitable membrane capable of converting those tones into variable electronic currents and a receiver to reproduce the variations and convert them back to audible format at the other end. In early June, Bell discovered that while working on his harmonic telegraph, he could hear a sound through the wire. It was the sound of a vibrating clock spring. It was on March 10, 1876, that Bell finally realized the success and communications potential of his new device. The possibilities of being able to speak on an electrical cable far exceeded those of a modified telegraph system, which was essentially based on dots and dashes.

According to Bell’s notebook entry for that date, he describes his most successful experiment with his new equipment, the telephone. Bell spoke to his assistant Watson, who was in the next room, through the instrument and said “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to talk to you.”

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His family was one of the leading authorities on elocution and speech correction. He was prepared and educated to pursue a career in the same specialty. At the age of just 29 in 1876, he had invented and patented the telephone. His in-depth knowledge of sound and acoustics helped enormously during the development of his phone and gave him an edge over others working on similar projects at the time. Bell was a quality intellectual rarely encountered since his death. He was a man who was always striving for success and looking for new ideas to nurture and develop.

The phone – important dates

1. 1874 – The telephone manager is discovered.

2. 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone, beating Elisha Gray in a matter of hours.

3. 1877 – The first permanent outdoor telephone cable was completed. It stretched a distance of only three miles. This was closely followed in the US by the world’s first commercial phone service.

4. 1878 – Viable exchange developed, allowing calls to be switched between subscribers instead of having direct lines.

5. 1879 – Subscribers began to be designated by numbers and not by their names.

6. 1880s – Long distance service expanded during this period using metallic circuits.

7. 1888 – Common battery system developed by Hammond V. Hayes, allows a central battery to power all the telephones in a switchboard, instead of relying on the battery in each unit.

8. 1891 – First automatic dialing system invented by a Kansas City undertaker. He believed that the corrupt operators were sending their potential customers elsewhere. His goal was to get rid of the operators completely.

9. 1900 – First coin-operated telephone installed in Hartford, Connecticut.

10. 1904 – “French Phone” developed by the Bell Company. This had the transmitter and receiver in a simple phone.

11. 1911 – American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) acquires Western Union Telegraph Company in hostile takeover. They covertly bought shares in the company and eventually the two merged.

12. 1918 – It was estimated that approximately ten million Bell system telephones were in service throughout the United States.

13. 1921 – The switching of a large number of calls was made possible by the use of phantom circuits. This allowed three conversations to take place on two pairs of wires.

14. 1927 – The first transatlantic service from New York to London was put into operation. The signal was transmitted by radio waves.

15. 1936 – Research on electronic telephone exchanges began, which was finally perfected in the 1960s with the electronic switching system (SES).

16. 1946 – The world’s first commercial mobile phone service goes into operation. It could connect moving vehicles to a telephone network via radio waves.

17. 1947 – Microwave radio technology is first used for long distance telephone calls.

18. 1947 – The transistor was invented at Bell Labs.

19. 1955 – The laying of transatlantic telephone cables begins.

20. 1962 – Telstar, the world’s first international communications satellite, is launched.

21. 1980s: The development of fiber optic cables during this decade offered the potential to carry a much higher volume of calls than satellites or microwaves.

22. 1980s, 1990s to present – The tremendous advances in microelectronics technology over the past two decades have allowed the development of cellular (mobile) phones to advance at a truly astonishing rate. A cell phone (mobile) has its own central transmitter that allows it to receive uninterrupted transmissions when entering and leaving a cell.

Some people believe that the impact the telephone has had on our lives is negative. Whatever your beliefs, there is no doubt that the invention and development of the telephone has had a massive impact on the way we live our lives and go about our daily activities.

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