The term ”telephone’ comes from the Greek words tele (which means far) and phone (voice). As with many revolutionizing devices humankind invented, there is a dispute about who created the first telephone. You might think that the inventors are Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, but what you don’t know is that they simply won some lawsuits over guys like Innocenzo Manzetti, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis and Elisha Gray, and the international courts simply awarded them the telephone patent.
It all started in 1844, with a guy named Innocenzo Manzetti, which first came up with the idea of a ’speaking telegraph’. In 1865, La Feuille d’Aoste accused the ‘English technicians to whom Mr. Manzetti illustrated his method’ of trying to apply the invention on several private telegraph lines.
In 1871, Antonio Meucci first described to the U.S. Patent Office how voice communication between two people by wire could be accomplished. Yes, he lost dozens of lawsuits against Bell and Edison too. In the following years, Bell patents his ‘Transmitters and Receivers for Electric Telegraphs’ and applies it to electromagnetic telephones using undulating currents. In 1877, Edison files for a patent on a carbon transmitter. The others drag him into numerous lawsuits for the next 15 years, and in 1879 he finally wins.
The first models of phones did not ‘ring’. If you wanted to talk to someone on the other end of the wire, you had to whistle until the other user came in. Aside that, the first types were of considerable sizes. The first smaller models appeared in the 1890s, which used a support for the transmitters, also providing a hook for it, which signaled that the device was on stand-by.
After the 1930s, all the telephone subscribers took advantage of central office batteries created to supply them with power. The next 50 years were characterized by the network enlargement, coming to what we know from the ’80s - almost every home had a touch tone telephone. Remember the little fellow in the picture below?
The first signs of digital telephony appeared in the early 1960s, when transmission networks were upgraded with T1 carrier systems. Its main benefit was that the number of channels multiplexed on a single transmission medium were significantly increased.
The most recent advancement in the telephone field is the IP telephony (Internet telephony), based on VoIP services (Voice over IP). In 2005, 10% of the Japanese and South Korean telephone subscribers switched to this new service, that looks like the next natural step in the evolution of telephone communications.
Image Credit: buddhab, GenuineRecordingsAustinTexas, tmcnet, epg-inc, wpclipart, redeemerlc.
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June 14th, 2008 at 3:13 am
IMO a phone is indispensable these days. Although there are much bigger problems in the world to discuss, the majority of Earth’s population uses the phone every day in all domains. We are addicted to phones!
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June 14th, 2008 at 8:11 am
An interesting article
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June 14th, 2008 at 8:24 am
I like how the old ones look like, but they are too bulky.
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June 14th, 2008 at 8:43 am
I imagine how the phone will look like in a few years
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June 14th, 2008 at 11:41 am
The old-fashioned phones were not so great which is normal. Congratulations for all the inventors who worked really hard to create the telephone. As for me, I don’t use a home telephone very much, cellphones are more “comfortable”..
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June 14th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
WHO WAS PHONE?
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July 1st, 2008 at 1:58 am
“the little fellow in the picture below?” is a rotary telephone, not a touch tone.
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August 28th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
The black 500 telephone, picture 5 of the 6 pictures shown above,
was designed by The industrial design firm of
Henry Dreyfuss & Associates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone
The Dreyfus mantra is ‘Form Follows Function’. and
‘Products should look like what they do’.
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