The Telephone

Probably no means of communication has revolutionized the daily lives of everyday people more than the invention of the Telephone. The telephone is an inexpensive, personal, and simple tool that is still growing to this day. With the invention of the phone, there has been many dispute of who the ‘true’ inventor is, with credit given to multiple people, it is still a toss-up.

In 1931, an Englishman named Michael Faraday proved his theory that vibrations of metal could be converted to electrical pulses, which was the technological basis of the telephone. Though Faraday was the first to discover this, he never fully was able to put his experiments in action, until 1861, when Johann Philip Reis[Photo] who is said to have built a simple apparatus that changed sound to electricity and back again to sound; but again, this device was incapable of transmitting most frequencies, and was never completely developed for later use. A working telephone was finally created by two men working in the United States, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell. When this happened, both men raced to fill out a patent on the design at the New York Patent Office on February 14, 1876, soon to make the telegram a forgettable device.

As the story goes, the first telephone call occurred on March 6, 1876, when Bell called for his assistant in another room saying, “Come here, Watson, I want you.” Watson heard Bell through a receiver connected to a transmitter that Bell had designed. What followed that event lead to changes that would envelope the world, with Bell creating the Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T), growing to be the largest phone company worldwide.

Since then, people have experimented with the different parts of the telephone, trying to push its boundaries to make it modern and acceptable by society. The ever changing world eventually didn’t want to make the time to stand and talk against a wall, pushing the design of this revolutionary creation, leading us to many different designs, types, and styles of phones to be produced in the years to come.

Travis