1844-idea of the phone -1935 first telephone call around the world

In 1844 The Telegraph was introduced by Samuel Morse. With the telegraph only one message could be sent at a time, which caused backups and delays, and required operators to translate the coded messages. The competition to find a solution to the telegraph was intense. Alexander bell was not the only one trying to develop a better way of communication, Thomas Edison, and the Western Union, were also striving to develop a telegraph that was capable of sending several messages simultaneously over a single wire. Between the birth of Bell and his invention of the telephone, many advancements where made with the telegraph concerning the communication industry.
From 1844-1876 their were many advancements with the telegraph , fifty-one telegraph companies were in operation , The western union was formed ,2250 telegraph offices in operation nationwide, and the invention of the multiplex telegraph by Edison .

In 1875 bell was in Boston teaching the deaf, and working on devices to help the hearing impaired. While he was in Boston he developed an earphone with a microphone using a bar magnet, a thin coil of wire and a thin metal disk. The device Bell made worked both as an earphone and a microphone. Moreover, at first the device didn’t transmit sound loud enough so Bell had to use a carbon microphone so the device (telephone) could be used for commercial use.

In 1876 Bell filed a patent but only three hours before Elisha Gray, over 600 patents were filed over the next eleven years. It settled in Bells favor, and on March seventh 1876 the first telephone patent No. 174,465 was issued to Alexander Graham Bell. Bell offered his patent to the western union for $100,000.In 1877 Bell Telephone Company was formed , with Alexander Graham Bell as “electrician” and Thomas Watson as “superintendent”. Then in 1878 the first telephone directory was established in New Haven, CT, and had 21 listings. In 1880 30,872 Bell telephone station were established in the United States. Moreover most of the progress made was from 1880-1889 was expansion of the Bell telephone company.

In 1889 Almon B. Strowger invented a switch that had line contacts in circular rows that are inside a cylinder, which were controlled by push buttons. Furthermore in 1892 Strowger developed the dial telephone system that eliminated the operator. Following Strowger’s dial system on the eighteenth of October the first long distance telephone service was formed, from New York to Chicago over a span of 900 miles. Then in 1894 all the basic patents expire and there is a period of extreme competition and a lot of engineers start churning out a bunch of new inventions. In 1995 was the invention of the radio, and selective trunking. Then in 1996 Guglielmo Marconi patents the wireless telegraph.

In 1899 the name of the Bell Telephone Company was changed to the American Telephone and Telegraph. Following the Bell companies name change in 1900 John J. Carty, the chief engineer of NY TEL and later AT&T installed loading coils to extend the range and utilize open wire transportation to reduce crosstalk. Eventually AT&T paid Michael Pupin $255,000 for the patent for the coils, and there are now 20,000 telcos in business and there are now 856,000telephones in service. Then from 1900 – 1915 although a lot of expansion occurred and a few companies merged the important events were, two element “Fleming Valve” is invented by John Ambrose, directive horizontal antenna is patented by Marconi, radios were commercialized and, formation of Automatic Telephone Manufacturing Co.. In between 1915 and 1934 not much happened, then in 1935 the first around –the- world telephone call was made as well as the first conversation by wire and radio, and there was the invention of the new Bakelite wall Monophone.


Katlin