Fascinating facts about the invention of the
telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876..

A practical telephone was actually invented independently by two men working in the United States, Elisha Gray and Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell. Incredibly, both men filed for a patent on their designs at the New York patent office on February 14, 1876, with Bell beating Gray by only two hours!  Although Gray had built the first steel diaphragm / electromagnet receiver in 1874, he wasn’t able to master the design of a workable transmitter until after Bell had. Bell had worked tirelessly, experimenting with various types of mechanisms, while Gray had become discouraged.

According to the famous story, the first fully intelligible telephone call occurred on March 6, 1876, when Bell, in one room, called to his assistant in another room. "Come here, Watson, I want you."

Watson heard the request through a receiver connected to the transmitter that Bell had designed, and what followed after that is a history of the founding of the Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T), which grew to be the largest telephone company in the world.

In 1978, American Telephone and Telegraph’s (AT&T) Bell Laboratories began testing a mobile telephone system based on hexagonal geographical regions called cells. As the caller’s vehicle passed from one cell to another, an automatic switching system would transfer the telephone call to another cell without interruption. The cellular telephone system began nationwide usage in the United States in 1983.

The actual history of the telephone is a subject of complex dispute. The controversy began with the success of the invention and continues today. Some of the inventors credited with inventing the telephone include Antonio Meucci, Philip Reis, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell.

TO LEARN MORE

RELATED INFORMATION:
Invention of the Mobile Telephone    from The Great Idea Finder
Alexander Graham Bell Biography    from The Great Idea Finder
Communication History   from The Great Idea Finder
History of Household Items    from The Great Idea Finder

ON THE BOOKSHELF:
100 Inventions That Shaped World History
by Bill Yenne, Morton, Dr. Grosser (Editor) / Paperback - 112 pages (1983) / Bluewood Books 
This book contains inventions from all around the world from microchips to fire. This is a really good book if you are going to do research on inventions.
Accidents May Happen: 50 Inventions Discovered by Mistake
by Charlotte Foltz Jones, John O'Brien (Illustrator) / Hardcover - 86 pages (1996) / Delacorte
Fifty inventions discovered by mistake serious subjects which will delight and entertain kids.
Popular Patents
by Travis Brown / Paperback - 224 pages / Scarecrow Press (September 1, 2000)
Eighty stories of America's first inventions. Each includes a sketch of the invention, a profile of the inventor and a glimpse of how the invention has found its way into American culture.
The Telephone : Turning Point Inventions
by Sarah Gearhart / School & Library Binding - 80 pages (September 1999) / Atheneum
The telephone revolutionized long-distance communication by allowing people to speak with each other quickly, clearly, and affordably. Today, you can send and receive information from virtually anywhere using a wireless telephone, faxes, or E-mail, thanks to Bell's invention of the telephone.
Understanding Telephone Electronics
by Joseph Carr, Steve Winder, Stephen Bigelow / Paperback: 432 pages / Newnes; 4 edition ( 2001)
Understanding Telephone Electronics, Fourth Edition will serve as an essential and invaluable resource for technicians, engineers, students at major universities and corporations, and anyone with an enthusiasm for telecommunication electronics.
The Telephone and Its Several Inventors : A History
by Lewis Coe / Hardcover (June 1995) / McFarland & Company
On the same day that Bell filed his patent application, a caveat (a preliminary patent document) was filed by Elisha Gray. This coincidence sparked the first of many debates over whether Bell was the true inventor of the telephone.

ON THE SCREEN:
The Telephone
DVD / 1 Volume Set / 50 Minutes / History Channel / Less than $25.00 / Also VHS
Undeniably essential to modern life, the telephone is the most important, influential, and effective communication tool ever developed. Exploring how one man's speaking device has grown into the technological web that links humankind, this thrilling program also revisits the race between Bell and rival Elisha Gray—who was building a similar design but ultimately filed the history-changing patent just two hours after Bell.
Digi-tech
DVD / 1 Volume Set / 50 Minutes / History Channel / Less than $25.00
See how the computing capacity of World-War II era room-sized computers is now surpassed by hand-held devices; visit Zenith to see a side-by-side comparison of regular television and HDTV; discover how a Cold War era NASA program is transforming personal photography, and get the inside story about MP3s.

ON THE WEB:
Alexander Graham Bell's Path to the Telephone
Development was funded, in part, by a grant from the History and Philosophy of Science program of the National Science Foundation. Maintained by the University of Virginia
The Telephone
From the PBS television series The American Experience: The Telephone
1876 The Telephone
The telephone was the beginning of a revolution in communications and commerce.
Cyber Telephone Museum
An Exhibit of Common & Rare Antique Telephones. Lots of great pictures.
Switchboard
Switchboard is the leading provider of white pages, yellow pages, free homepages, free email, and other personalization services on the web.
Telephones in the Office
SciTech, Carbons to Computers series from the Smithsonian Institution. The early office phone was a black, rotary-dial desk model, the Model 500 series, introduced by Bell Telephone Labs. in 1949.
(URL; www.smithsonianeducation.org/scitech/carbons/phones.html)
Antique Telephone Collectors Association
The Antique Telephone Collectors Association, or ATCA, is the largest telephone collectors
organization in the world.
"talking telegraph" Patent of 1871
Antonio Meucci (1808 - 1889) sued Alexander Bell for patent infringement and was nearing victory - the supreme court agreed to hear the case and fraud charges were initiated against Bell - when the Florentine died in 1889. The legal action died with him.
Johann Philipp Reis Telephone
In 1861 Johann Phillip Reis completed the first non-working telephone. His transmitter and receiver used a cork, a knitting needle, a sausage skin, and a piece of platinum to transmit bits of music and certain other sounds. But intelligible speech could not be reproduced.
The Invention of the Telephone
Be it known that I, Elisha Gray, of Chicago, in the County of Cook, and State of Illinois, have invented a new art of transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically, of which the following is a specification:

WORDS OF WISDOM:
"The human voice carries entirely too far as it is...and now you fellows come along and seek to complicate matters." - Mark Twain on the invention of the telephone.
"A woman... said she was so lonesome she had been taking a bath three times a day in hope that the phone would ring." - Marshall McLuhan, 1964

HOW IT WORKS:
How a Telephone. Works
The very simplest working telephone would look like this inside: A ThinkQuest student Web project.

DID YOU KNOW?:

• Patent No. 174,465 US issued March 7, 1876 to A. Graham Bell for the Telegraphy
• In the first month of the Bell Telephone Company's existence in 1877, only six telephones were sold!
• When Bell's patent was sixteen months old, there were 778 telephones in use.
• Fifteen years after its invention in 1876, there were five million phones in America. Fifteen years after the invention of cellular phones, more than 33 million wireless phones were in the U.S.
• During the depths of the Depression, telephones in use fell from 16 to 13 per 100 population and by the late 1970's the number had surpassed 75 per 100 population.
• It took the telephone 75 years and television 13 years to acquire 50 million users. It has taken the Internet five years. Today, more than 500 million people around the world are connected to the Internet.
• In 1878, Rutherford B. Hayes was the first US president to have a telephone installed in the White House. And to whom did the commander-in-chief place his first call? Alexander Graham Bell, of course, who was waiting for the call some 13 miles away from the White House. The president's first words were said to have been, "Please speak more slowly."
• When Alexander Graham Bell died on August 4, 1922, millions of phones went dead. In Bell's honor, all phones served by the Bell System in the USA and Canada went silent for one minute.