User:KVB2020UPRC/History of the telephone

History

The telephone was invented in 1870 by two inventors who both independently designed devices that could transmit sound along electrical cables. The name of the two inventors were Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray. Alexander Graham Bell device was registered at the patent office hours before Elisha Gray registered her device too. There followed a bitter legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell subsequently won. A telephone is a telecommunication device that permits two or more persons to conduct a conversation when they are in different places and cannot talk in person. The telephone it has become the most widely used telecommunications device in the world. Before Bell had the idea to create the "telephone" he attempted to improve the telegraph, he thought that the main problem with the telegraph was that it used  Morse code and that was limited because you just could send or receive one message at a time. He wanted to create the possibility after transmitting more than one message along the same wire at one time. He at first wanted to create the “harmonic Telegraph” based on the principal musical notes could be sent simultaneously down the same wire. Gardiner Green Hubbard, Bell’s future father in law, gave him de financial backing required for him to carry on his work developing the multiple Telegraph but over that summer Bell and  another brilliant young electrician, Thomas Watson, were developing an idea that was to create a device that could transmit the human voice electrically. By June 1875 they realized their goal of creating a device that could transmit speech electrically would soon be realized. It was on March 10th, 1876 that Bell Watch to finally realize their success and communications potential of his new device. According to Bell's notebook entry for that date, he describes his most successful experiment using his new piece of 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 speak to you.” With this success, Bell began to promote the telephone in a series of public demonstrations. At the 1876, Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Bell demonstrated the telephone to the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro, who exclaimed, “My God, it talks!”. Other demonstration followed, each at a greater distance than the last. The Bell Telephone Company was organized on July 9, 1877. In January 1915, Bell was invited to make the first transcontinental phone call, from New York, he spoke with his former associate Watson in San Francisco. Others claimed they had invented the telephone or had conceived the idea before Bell. Over 18 years, the Bell Company faced over 550 court challenges, including several that went to the Supreme Court, but none were successful. Even during the patent battles, the company grew. Between 1866 and 1877, over 150,000 people in the Unites States owned telephones. Improvements were made on the device including the addition of a microphone, invented by Thomas Edison, which eliminated the need to shout into the telephone to be heard.

Bell did not invent this device out of thin air, early telephones had started being developed as early as the 1660s. These telephones were incredibly primitive compared to Bell's telephone, but they still deserve to be mentioned. Early telephones are more accurately called “mechanical acoustic devices”. Instead of transforming audio energy into electrical energy, these devices simply transmitted voice data mechanically, like through pipes and other media. British physicist Robert Hooke was credited as the first person to invent one of these devices. Between 1664 and 1685, Hooke conducted numerous experiments with these devices. The first telephone-like device, an acoustic string phone, is credited to him in 1667.

In 1753, a Scottish scientist named Charles Morrison proposed an important theory; you could Transmit messages through electricity by using different wires for each letter. Morrison is credited as the first person to theorize that an electric Telegraph could exist. In 1804, Catalan scientist and inventor Francisco Salva Campillo created an electrochemical telegraph. In 1832, Baron Schilling improved upon the device. Two German inventors created their own electromagnetic telegraph in 1833. The first working electrical telegraph, however, was not put into place until April 1839 when it was constructed on the Great Western Railway in England.

In 1837, Samuel Morse independently developed his own electrical telegraph and patented the invention in America. His assistant, Alfred Vail, created a Morse code signaling alphabet that could be used to transmit messages electronically. By 1838, Morse had sent America’s first telegraph. We needed electrical telegraphs before the telephone because both are wired-based electrical systems. Alexander Graham Bell’s success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph. By the time Bell began experimenting with using electrical signals to send audio data, the telegraph has been an established means of communication for nearly three decades.

Bell successfully used his telephone invention in 1876. By 1877, construction of the first regular telephone line between Boston and Somerville, Massachusetts had been completed. Telephone line construction exploded with growth over the next few years. By 1880, there were 47,900 telephones across America. By 1881. Telephone service between Boston and Providence had been established. By 1892, a telephone line had been constructed between New York and Chicago. By 1894, New York and Boston were connected.

The first telephone switchboard was created at the same time as the first telephone line in 1877, in Boston. However, it was not established until January 17, 1882, when Leroy Firman received the first patent for a telephone switchboard. By 1971, Erna Schneider Hoover had patented the first computerized telephone exchange.

Types of telephone ·      The world's first pay phone was created and patented by an inventor named William Gray from Connecticut. The pay phone was coin-operated and installed in Hartford Bank in 1889.

·      The first Rotary dial was invented in 1896. Prior to that, telephone owners would have to push a button on their telephone the required number of pulses by tapping in order to call a number. Understandably, the Rotary dial was seen as a superior alternative to this system. By 1943, the last button tapping telephone had been phased out. Rotary dials worked by generating pulses in a certain frequency range based on where the Rotary dial turned. ·      Candlestick phone were popularized throughout the 1890s to the 1930s. The candlestick phone was separated into two pieces a mouthpiece that stood up right and a receiver which was placed in your ear when you were placing a phone call. By the 1930s, these types of phones had phased out of fashion as phone manufacturers started combining the mouthpiece and receive into a single unit (a trend that continues to the modern day).

·      The first touch tone phone was invented in 1941. These phones used tones in the voice frequency range, much different from the pulses generated by rotary dials. You pressed the buttons on the phone to make a phone call.

·      Cordless phones started to hit the market in the 1970s. In 1986, the FTC had released the frequency range between 47 and 49 MHz for use by cordless phones. In 1998 the FCC granted the frequency range of 2.4 GHz to cordless phones. In 2003, they bumped the upper limit to the frequency range to 5.8 GHz.

·      The first cell phones dates back to post-World War II America. It would take about 40 years before the world’s first commercially available mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTAC, Martin Cooper had made the world’s first mobile phone call ever using a predecessor of the DynaTAC. Not just anybody could buy a DynaTAC phone because it weighted 1.75 pounds, had 30 minutes of talk time, and cost $3,995.

Alexander Graham Bell Biography

Alexander Graham Bell is most well known for inventing the telephone. He went to the United States as a teacher of the deaf and conceived the idea of “electronic speech” while visiting his mother in Canada. This let him to invent the microphone on later the “electrical speech machine”, his name for the first telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born scientist and inventor best known for inventing the first working telephone in 1876 and founding the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 3, 1847. The second son of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell, he was named for his paternal grandfather. The middle name “Graham” was added when he was 10 years old. He had two brothers, Melville James Bell and Edward Charles Bell, both of whom died from tuberculosis. His grandfather and father were experts on the mechanics of voice and elocution. And Bell’s mother, Eliza. Became an accomplished pianist despite being deaf, inspiring him to undertake big challenges. Bell was homeschooled by her mother and instilled an infinite curiosity od the world around him. But he received one year of formal education in a private school and two years at Edinburgh’s acclaimed Royal High School. At age 12, Bell displayed an uncommon ability to solve problems. One day while playing with a friend in a grain mill, he noticed the slow process of husking the wheat grain and he went home and built a device with rotating paddles and nail brushes that easily removed the husks from the grain. By age 16, Alexander had joined his father in his work with the deaf and soon assumed full charge of his father’s London operations. In 1870 the Bell family moved to Canada and there Bell set up a workshop to continue his study of the human voice. On July 11, 1877, Alexander married Mable Hubbard, a former student, and the daughter of Gardiner Hubbard, one of his early financial backers. Mable had been deaf since her early childhood years. In 1880, Bell established the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. an experimental facility devoted to scientific discovery. Later in his life, Bell became fascinated with flight and began exploring the possibilities for flying machines and devices, starting with the tetrahedral kite in 1890s. In 1907, he formed the Aerial Experiment Association with Glenn Curtiss and several other associates. The group developed several flying machines, including the Silver Dart. In 1898 Bell assumed the presidency of a small, little-known United States scientific group, the National Geographic Society, and helped make their journal into one of the world’s most loved publications. He was also one of the founders of Science magazine. Alexander Graham Bell died peacefully on August 2, 1922, at his home in Canada, shortly after his death, the entire telephone system was shut down for one minute in tribute to his genius.