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The telephone played a major communications role in American history from the 1876 publication of its first patent by Alexander Graham Bell onward. In the 20th century the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) dominated the telecommunication market as the at times largest company in the world, until it was broken up in 1982 and replaced by a system of competitors.
The master telephone patent granted to Bell, 174465, March 7, 1876. The modern telephone is the result of the work of many people. [12] Alexander Graham Bell was, however, the first to patent the telephone, as an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically".
20 March 1880: National Bell Telephone merges with others to form the American Bell Telephone Company. 1 April 1880: world's first wireless telephone call on Bell and Tainter's photophone (distant precursor to fiber-optic communications) from the Franklin School in Washington, D.C. to the window of Bell's laboratory, 213 meters away. [20] [21]
A retired director general of the Telecom Italia central telecommunications research institute , Basilio Catania, [12] and the Italian Society of Electrotechnics, "Federazione Italiana di Elettrotecnica", have devoted a Museum to Antonio Meucci, constructing a chronology of his invention of the telephone and tracing the history of the two legal ...
As phone lines became more popular—between 1942 and 1962, the number of phones in the U.S. grew 230% to 76 million—telephone companies realized they would run out of phone numbers.
Telephone technology grew quickly after the first commercial services emerged, with inter-city lines being built and telephone exchanges in every major city of the United States by the mid-1880s. [ 17 ] [ 18 ] [ 19 ] The first transcontinental telephone call occurred on January 25, 1915.
After the creation of the telephone itself, Watson invented many accessories for it. Most important was the ringer, which would alert someone not standing by the telephone that a call was being placed. The first version involved a hammer, which had to hit the diaphragm; [5] this was followed by a version employing a buzzer. [6]
A tin can phone is a type of acoustic (non-electrical) speech-transmitting device made up of two tin cans, paper cups or similarly shaped items attached to either end of a taut string or wire. It is a particular case of mechanical telephony , where sound (i.e., vibrations in the air) is converted into vibrations along a liquid or solid medium .