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.
Before the invention of electromagnetic telephones, mechanical acoustic devices existed for transmitting speech and music over a greater distance. This distance was greater than that of normal direct speech. The earliest mechanical telephones were based on sound transmission through pipes or other physical media. The acoustic tin can telephone, or "lovers' phone", has been known for centuries. It connects two diaphragms with a taut string or wire, which transmits sound by mechanical vibrations from one to the other along the wire (and not by a modulated electric current). The classic example is the children's toy made by connecting the bottoms of two paper cups, metal cans, or plastic bottles with tautly held string.
Some of the earliest known experiments were conducted by the British physicist and polymath, Robert Hooke, from 1664 to 1685. An acoustic string phone made in 1667 has been attributed to him. An early version was also found in use by the Chimu in Peru. The gourd and stretched-hide version resides in the Smithsonian Museum collection and dates back to around the 7th century AD.
For a few years in the late 1800s, acoustic telephones were marketed commercially as a competitor to the electrical telephone. When the Bell telephone patents expired and many new telephone manufacturers began competing, acoustic telephone makers quickly went out of business. Their maximum range was very limited. An example of one such company was the Pulsion Telephone Supply Company created by Lemuel Mellett in Massachusetts, which designed its version in 1888 and deployed it on railroad right-of-ways.
Additionally, speaking tubes have long been common, especially within buildings and aboard ships, and they are still in use today.
Electrical telegraph
The telephone emerged from the making and successive improvements of the electrical telegraph.
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The push-button telephone is a telephone that has buttons or keys for dialing a telephone number, in contrast to having a rotary dial as in earlier telephone instruments. Western Electric experimented as early as 1941 with methods of using mechanically activated reeds to produce two tones for each of the ten digits and by the late 1940s such technology was field-tested in a No. 5 Crossbar switching system in Pennsylvania.
The history of telecommunication began with the use of smoke signals and drums in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the 1790s, the first fixed semaphore systems emerged in Europe. However, it was not until the 1830s that electrical telecommunication systems started to appear. This article details the history of telecommunication and the individuals who helped make telecommunication systems what they are today. The history of telecommunication is an important part of the larger history of communication.
This timeline of the telephone covers landline, radio, and cellular telephony technologies and provides many important dates in the history of the telephone. 1667: Robert Hooke creates an acoustic string telephone that conveys sounds over a taut extended wire by mechanical vibrations. 1844: Innocenzo Manzetti first suggests the idea of an electric "speaking telegraph", or telephone. 1849: Antonio Meucci demonstrates a communicating device to individuals in Havana.
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