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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.
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.
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]
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.
List of sovereign states by number of broadband Internet subscriptions; List of countries by number of Internet users; List of countries by smartphone penetration; List of mobile network operators; List of multiple-system operators; List of telecommunications companies
Because of illness and other commitments, Bell made little or no telephone improvements or experiments for eight months until after his U.S. patent 174,465 was published., [30] but within a year the first telephone exchange was built in Connecticut and the Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, with Bell the owner of a third of the shares ...
This 1911 advertisement from Seattle shows phone numbers from two different phone companies; the exchanges were not interconnected. An independent telephone company was a telephone company providing local service in the United States or Canada that was not part of the Bell System organized by American Telephone and Telegraph. Independent ...