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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.
Shows Bell's second telephone transmitter , invented 1876 and first displayed at the Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia. This history of the telephone chronicles the development of the electrical telephone, and includes a brief overview of its predecessors. The first telephone patent was granted to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876.
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.
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]
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 ...
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 mobile phone or cellphone or hand phone is a handheld telephone which connects via radio transmissions to a cellular telephone network. The cellular network consists of a network of ground based transmitter/receiver stations with antennas – which are usually located on towers or on buildings – and infrastructure connecting to the global ...