The Invention of the Telephone

Although, whenever anyone thinks about the telephone and who invented it, the name Alexander Graham Bell automatically springs to mind, but it very nearly was not he, as the patenting of the design ended up as a race between Bell and one Elisha Gray. Bell managed to register his design first, which resulted in a major legal battle between the two parties for right to claim to be the inventor of the telephone, which Bell subsequently won. And now the history books record the inventor of the telephone to be Alexander Graham Bell.

The telephone was the next evolutionary step from the renowned telegraph system in the area of telecommunications. Like the telegraph the telephone is a wire based electrical system (at least the first incarnation of the telephone was wire based, unlike now where we have fibre optics and satellite based telecommunication systems). Unlike the telegraph, the telephone system is able to transmit multiple signals, thus multiple messages along the wire at the same time.

The telegraph system used Morse Code (originally created by one Samuel F B Morse in the early 1840s, where letters are represented by a series of dots and dashes, where dots were where the signal set is short, and dash is when the signal sent is long) to encode the messages that were transmitted across the telegraph wire, and only one message could use the telegraph wire at any given time.

Some intrepid inventor types realised that the telegraph wire should be able to transmit multiple signals simultaneously and thus allow the transmission of many messages at the same time along the same wire.

It was whilst working on finding a solution to the conversion from being able to only transfer one message at a time to the transmission of multiple messages simultaneously, that Alexander Graham Bell and others realised that besides being able to send multiple messages in Morse Code, it was also possible to send different types of signals which resulted in different types of sound.

The first ever sound made was of a twanging clock spring. This happened on the 2nd of June, 1875, whilst Bell was running some experiments along with his assistant Thomas Watson.

On March the 10th 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first ever voice transmission. He sent a message to his assistant, saying “Mr Watson come here I need you”. The day of the first ever voice communication over the telephone also marked the birth of this communication device.

It Is possible to obtain the types of telephones used since the telephone first came into existence. They are usually either known as vintage telephones or retro telephones. Generally there is a difference between a vintage telephone and a retro telephone in that a retro telephone looks and feels like the phone it depicts but its inner workings are modern (not always the case), whereas a vintage telephone is an original , it would have been made at the time that its appearance depicts, e.g. vintage trim phone would have been made in the 1970s, vintage rotary dial telephone would have been made between the 1950s to 1970s.