When were telephones first used in homes?
Telephone switchboard
Following the invention of the telephone in 1876, the first telephones were rented in pairs which were limited to conversation between the parties operating those two instruments. The use of a central exchange was soon found to be even more advantageous than in telegraphy. In January 1878 the Boston Telephone Dispatch company had started hiring boys as telephone operators. Boys had been very successful as telegraphy operators, but their attitude, lack of patience, and behavior was unacceptable for live telephone contact, so the company began hiring women operators instead. Thus, on September 1, 1878, Boston Telephone Dispatch hired Emma Nutt as the first woman operator. Small towns typically had the switchboard installed in the operator's home so that he or she could answer calls on a 24-hour basis. In 1894, New England Telephone and Telegraph Company installed the first battery-operated switchboard on January 9 in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Bell Homestead National Historic Site
Only a few months after receiving U.S. Patent No. 174465 at the beginning of March 1876, Bell conducted three important tests of his new telephone invention and technology after returned to his parents at Melville House for the summer. The third and most important test was the world's first true long distance call, placed between Brantford and Paris, Ontario on 10 August 1876. For that long distance call Alexander Graham Bell set up a telephone using telegraph lines at Robert White's Boot and Shoe Store at 90 Grand River Street North in Paris via its Dominion Telegraph Co. office on Colborne Street. The normal telegraph line between Paris and Brantford was not quite 13 km (8 miles) length, but the connection was extended a further 93 km (58 miles) to Toronto to allow the use of a battery in its telegraph office.
Telephone tapping
The history of voice communication technology begins in 1876 with the invention of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. In the 1890s, “law enforcement agencies begin tapping wires on early telephone networks”. Remote voice communications “were carried almost exclusively by circuit-switched systems,” where telephone switches would connect wires to form a continuous circuit and disconnect the wires when the call ended). All other telephone services, such as call forwarding and message taking, were handled by human operators. However, the first computerized telephone switch was developed by Bell Labs in 1965. This got rid of standard wiretapping techniques.
United States Telecom Association
The United States Telecom Association (USTelecom) was founded in Chicago, Illinois, on May 17, 1897, when a group of Independent telephone company executives convened at the Palmer House to create an organization called the Independent Telephone Association. According to some industry historians, thousands of independent telephone companies sprouted in the telephone industry at the turn of the century largely due to the expiration of the first Alexander Graham Bell telephone patents on January 30, 1894. These companies banded together to promote growth of their industry and develop alliances on issues that crossed state lines. Renamed as the United States Independent Telephone Association in 1915, the organization focused on educational programs for its members, standardization efforts and representing its members on relevant policy issues addressed by the federal government. For instance, as the telephone industry grew, Congress enacted new laws, including the Communications Act of 1934 that established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which among a variety of initiatives, set a universal service goal of connecting all Americans via affordable, accessible telecommunications services. To meet the requirements of the new statutes, telephone companies worked through the association to educate members, develop common policy positions and interface with policymakers in Congress and at the FCC. USTelecom also advocates on behalf of the telecommunications industry to Courts, the White House, and the media.
Warsaw, Indiana
Gas lights were installed in August 1880. Telephone lines were strung in 1882, with Dr. Eggleston having the first phone. The waterworks were constructed in 1885. Gas was supplemented with electricity in 1897, but gas was still used in many homes until 1915.
Dialling (telephony)
From 1912, the British General Post Office, which also operated the British telephone system, installed several automatic telephone exchanges from several vendors in trials at Darlington on 10 October 1914 (rotary system), Fleetwood (relay exchange from Sweden), Grimsby (Siemens), Hereford (Lorimer) and Leeds (Strowger). The BPO selected the Strowger switches for small and medium cities and towns. However, the selection of switching systems for London and other large cities was not decided until the 1920s, when the Director telephone system was adopted. The Director systems used SXS switches for destination routing and number translation facilities similar to the register used in common-control exchanges. Using similar equipment as in the rest of the network was deemed beneficial and the equipment could be manufactured in Britain.
Introduced to the public in 1963 by AT&T, Touch-Tone dialing greatly shortened the time of initiating a telephone call. It also enabled direct signaling from a telephone across the long-distance network using audio-frequency tones, which was impossible with the rotary dials that generated digital direct current pulses that had to be decoded by the local central office.
Telephone number
The latter part of 1879 and the early part of 1880 saw the first use of telephone numbers at Lowell, Massachusetts. During an epidemic of measles, the physician, Dr. Moses Greeley Parker, feared that Lowell's four telephone operators might all succumb to sickness and bring about paralysis of telephone service. He recommended the use of numbers for calling Lowell's more than 200 subscribers so that substitute operators might be more easily trained in such an emergency. Parker was convinced of the telephone's potential, began buying stock, and by 1883 he was one of the largest individual stockholders in both the American Telephone Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company.
History of the telephone
Cable television companies began to use their fast-developing cable networks, with ducting under the streets of the United Kingdom, in the late 1980s, to provide telephony services in association with major telephone companies. One of the early cable operators in the UK, Cable London, connected its first cable telephone customer in about 1990.
Invention of the telephone
The Reis telephone was developed from 1857 on. Allegedly, the transmitter was difficult to operate, since the relative position of the needle and the contact were critical to the device's operation. Thus, it can be called a "telephone", since it did transmit voice sounds electrically over distance, but was hardly a commercially practical telephone in the modern sense.
Nantclwyd y Dre
Nantclwyd House was the first house on Castle Street to have a telephone installed. The Rev. Thomas Pritchard lived here from 1907 to 1917 – he was the Rector of Llanfwrog Church. The wooden case held two batteries that worked the microphone. By turning the handle of the Magneto a bell would ring in the exchange and the person would tell the operator which number they wanted to be connected to. Electricity arrived at Nantclwyd at around 1914, provided by the Ruthin Electricity Supply Company.
Field telephone
Shortly after the invention of the telephone attempts were made to adapt the technology for military use. Telephones were already being used to support military campaigns in British India and in British colonies in Africa in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In the United States telephone lines connected fortresses with each other and with army headquarters. They were also used for fire control at fixed coastal defence installations. The first telephone for use in the field was developed in the United States in 1889 but it was too expensive for mass production. Subsequent developments in several countries made the field telephone more practicable. The wire material was changed from iron to copper, devices for laying wire in the field were developed and systems with both battery-operated sets for command posts and hand generator sets for use in the field were developed. The first purposely-designed field telephones were used by the British in the Second Boer War. They were used more extensively in the Russo-Japanese War, where all infantry regiments and artillery divisions on both sides were equipped with telephone sets. By the First World War the use of field telephones was widespread.
Invention of the telephone
The first long distance telephone call was made on August 10, 1876, by Bell from the family homestead in Brantford, Ontario, to his assistant located in Paris, Ontario, some 10 miles (16 km) apart.
Invention of the telephone
In 1906 the citizens of the City of Brantford, Ontario, Canada and its surrounding area formed the Bell Memorial Association to commemorate the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in July 1874 at his parent's home, Melville House, near Brantford. Walter Allward's design was the unanimous choice from among 10 submitted models, winning the competition. The memorial was originally to be completed by 1912 but Allward did not finish it until five years later. The Governor General of Canada, Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire, ceremoniously unveiled the memorial on October 24, 1917.
Wylie House
The house was the site of several scientific and technological advancements. Theophilus began to experiment with photography soon after the daguerreotype process was invented in 1839, many of the photographs he took at the house survive today. He often used a telescope for celestial observations from the roof of the house. And in 1876 Theophilus installed the first telephone in state of Indiana, built from plans sent to him from a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, that ran between the house and a college laboratory. Theophilus was an active faculty member at Indiana University until 1886. In that year he became an emeritus professor in which capacity he served to until his death in 1895. Rebecca Wylie continued to live in the house until her death in 1913.
The Telephone Cases
The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. 1 (1888), were a series of U.S. court cases in the 1870s and 1880s related to the invention of the telephone, which culminated in the 1888 decision of the United States Supreme Court upholding the priority of the patents belonging to Alexander Graham Bell. Those telephone patents were relied on by the American Bell Telephone Company and the Bell System—although they had also acquired critical microphone patents from Emile Berliner.
Bell Homestead National Historic Site
During his summer vacation at the Homestead in 1874, Alexander Graham continued to contemplate electrical sound reproduction while viewing the undulating surface of the Grand River from his "dreaming place". He postulated that "it would be possible to transmit sounds of any sort" by the continuous variation of the intensity of the electric current. This method of sound energy to electrical signal transduction was fundamentally different from the on-or-off transmission methods used by other telephone experimenters. Alexander Graham held lengthy discussions with his father explaining what he thought he could achieve with a sound-driven transmitter producing an electrical signal which would instantaneously travel an electrical circuit to a receiver at another location where it would be converted back to sound. His record of a discussion with his father in their home's living room, wrote "If I could vary the intensity of the electric current in exact proportion to the variation of the air density in the production of words, I would be able to transmit speech by telegraph" (using the telephone's technical analog, the "telegraph", as the former name had not yet been adapted). On 26 July 1874 in their living room the younger Bell realized the technical principles of telephony, inventing the telecommunications device he is now closely identified with. Returning again to the Homestead the next summer in 1875 Bell wrote his first draft specifications of the telephone patent—commonly considered to be the most valuable patent in history—that September. He later built his first fully functional unit at Boston on 10 March 1876. Later that year, in August, Bell made the first successful voice transmission of any notable distance, between Brantford and Paris Ontario.
First transcontinental telephone call
A telephone call, which for marketing purposes is claimed to be the first transcontinental telephone call, occurred on Jan. 25, 1915, a day timed to coincide with the Panama–Pacific International Exposition celebrations. However, the transcontinental telephone line was first completed on June 17, 1914, and successfully first voice tested in July 1914. A 1998 U.S. postage stamp commemorates the completion of the line in 1914.
Electrical telegraph
The first working telegraph was built by the English inventor Francis Ronalds in 1816 and used static electricity. At the family home on Hammersmith Mall, he set up a complete subterranean system in a 175 yard long trench as well as an eight mile long overhead telegraph. The lines were connected at both ends to revolving dials marked with the letters of the alphabet and electrical impulses sent along the wire were used to transmit messages. Offering his invention to the Admiralty in July 1816, it was rejected as "wholly unnecessary". His account of the scheme and the possibilities of rapid global communication in "Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph and of some other Electrical Apparatus" was the first published work on electric telegraphy and even described the risk of signal retardation due to induction. Elements of Ronalds’ design were utilised in the subsequent commercialisation of the telegraph over 20 years later.
The telegraph invented by Baron Schilling von Canstatt in 1832 had a transmitting device which consisted of a keyboard with 16 black-and-white keys. These served for switching the electric current. The receiving instrument consisted of six galvanometers with magnetic needles, suspended from silk threads. Both stations of Schilling's telegraph were connected by eight wires; six were connected with the galvanometers, one served for the return current and one for a signal bell. When at the starting station the operator pressed a key, the corresponding pointer was deflected at the receiving station. Different positions of black and white flags on different disks gave combinations which corresponded to the letters or numbers. Pavel Schilling subsequently improved its apparatus. He reduced the number of connecting wires from eight to two.
On 21 October 1832, Schilling managed a short-distance transmission of signals between two telegraphs in different rooms of his apartment. In 1836, the British government attempted to buy the design but Schilling instead accepted overtures from Nicholas I of Russia. Schilling's telegraph was tested on a experimental underground and underwater cable, laid around the building of the main Admiralty in Saint Petersburg and was approved for a telegraph between the imperial palace at Peterhof and the naval base at Kronstadt. However, the project was cancelled following Schilling's death in 1837. Schilling was also one of the first to put into practice the idea of the binary system of signal transmission.
In 1833, Carl Friedrich Gauss, together with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber in Göttingen installed a wire above the town's roofs. Gauss combined the Poggendorff-Schweigger multiplicator with his magnetometer to build a more sensitive device, the galvanometer. To change the direction of the electric current, he constructed a commutator of his own. As a result, he was able to make the distant needle move in the direction set by the commutator on the other end of the line.
History of mobile phones
The first fully automated mobile phone system for vehicles was launched in Sweden in 1956. Named MTA (Mobiltelefonisystem A), it allowed calls to be made and received in the car using a rotary dial. The car phone could also be paged. Calls from the car were direct dial, whereas incoming calls required an operator to locate the nearest base station to the car. It was developed by Sture Laurén and other engineers at Televerket network operator. Ericsson provided the switchboard while Svenska Radioaktiebolaget (SRA) and Marconi provided the telephones and base station equipment. MTA phones consisted of vacuum tubes and relays, and weighed . In 1962, an upgraded version called "Mobile System B (MTB)" was introduced. This was a push-button telephone, and used transistors and DTMF signaling to improve its operational reliability. In 1971 the MTD version was launched, opening for several different brands of equipment and gaining commercial success. The network remained open until 1983 and still had 600 customers when it closed.
Innocenzo Manzetti
Suggestions of the alleged intellectual property theft appear unsubstantiated, as there were no historical records of English technicians or companies implementing 'speaking telegraphs' in the U.K., or elsewhere, in that time period. The United Kingdom did not see its first telephone demonstrations until A.G. Bell demonstrated one of his early devices to Queen Victoria and others in 1877. Well documented sources record that Bell first conceptualized and invented electrical telephony in Canada in July 1874, and did not actually build a working model until March 1876, thus mooting the suggestion of the invention's theft from Manzetti by Bell or others although contacts between Bell and Meucci prior to Bell's patent filings are confirmed.
History of telecommunication
The electric telephone was invented in the 1870s, based on earlier work with harmonic (multi-signal) telegraphs. The first commercial telephone services were set up in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of New Haven, Connecticut in the US and London, England in the UK. Alexander Graham Bell held the master patent for the telephone that was needed for such services in both countries. All other patents for electric telephone devices and features flowed from this master patent. Credit for the invention of the electric telephone has been frequently disputed, and new controversies over the issue have arisen from time-to-time. As with other great inventions such as radio, television, the light bulb, and the digital computer, there were several inventors who did pioneering experimental work on "voice transmission over a wire", who then improved on each other's ideas. However, the key innovators were Alexander Graham Bell and Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who created the first telephone company, the Bell Telephone Company in the United States, which later evolved into American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), at times the world's largest phone company.
Invention of the telephone
The telephone exchange was an idea of the Hungarian engineer Tivadar Puskás (1844–1893) in 1876, while he was working for Thomas Edison on a telegraph exchange. Puskás was working on his idea for an electrical telegraph exchange when Alexander Graham Bell received the first patent for the telephone. This caused Puskás to take a fresh look at his own work and he refocused on perfecting a design for a telephone exchange. He then got in touch with the U.S. inventor Thomas Edison who liked the design. According to Edison, "Tivadar Puskas was the first person to suggest the idea of a telephone exchange".
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in March 1876. The Bell patents were forensically victorious and commercially decisive. That first patent by Bell was the "master patent" of the telephone, from which other patents for electric telephone devices and features flowed.
Mobile Telephone Service
This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946. The original equipment weighed , and there were initially only 3 channels for all the users in the metropolitan area, later more licenses were added bringing the total to 32 channels across 3 bands (See IMTS frequencies). This service was used at least into the 1980s in large portions of North America. On October 2, 1946, Motorola communications equipment carried the first calls on Illinois Bell Telephone Company's new car radiotelephone service in Chicago. Due to the small number of radio frequencies available, the service quickly reached capacity.
Twisted pair
The earliest telephones used telegraph lines, or open-wire single-wire earth return circuits. In the 1880s electric trams were installed in many cities, which induced noise into these circuits. Lawsuits being unavailing, the telephone companies converted to balanced circuits, which had the incidental benefit of reducing attenuation, hence increasing range.
Bell Homestead National Historic Site
"Scientific American" noted the test calls in their 9 September 1876 article, The Human Voice Transmitted by Telegraph. Historian Thomas Costain referred to them as "the three great tests of the telephone". One journalist wrote of them, "No one involved in these early calls could possibly have understood the future impact of these communication firsts".
Timeline of United States inventions (before 1890)
A payphone or pay phone is a public telephone, usually located in a stand-alone upright container such as a phone booth, with payment done by inserting money (usually coins), a credit or debit card, or a telephone card before the call is made. Pay telephone stations preceded the invention of the pay phone and existed as early as 1878. These stations were supervised by telephone company attendants or agents who collected the money due after people made their calls. In 1889, the first coin-operated telephone was installed by inventor William Gray at a bank in Hartford, Connecticut. However, it was a "postpay" machine that only accepted coins deposited after the call was placed.
Technological and industrial history of the United States
Alexander Graham Bell obtained a patent in 1876 to a device that could transmit and reproduce the sound of a voice over electrical cables. Bell realized the enormous potential for his telephone and formed the Bell Telephone Company which would control the whole system from the manufacture the telephones and exchange equipment to leasing the equipment to customers and operators. Between 1877 and 1893 (the term of Bell's patent coverage) the number of phones leased by Bell's company increased from 3,000 to 260,000, although these were largely limited to businesses and government offices that could afford the relatively high rates. After the Bell patents expired, thousands of independent operators became incorporated and their competition for services to middle and low-class households as well as rural farmers drove prices down significantly. By 1920, there were 13 million phones in the United States providing service to 39 percent of all farm households and 34 percent of non-farm households.
History of mobile phones
In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles. At this stage, the technology to implement these ideas did not exist, nor had the frequencies been allocated. Two decades would pass before Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs expanded the early proposals into a much more detailed system plan. It was Porter who first proposed that the cell towers use the now-familiar directional antennas to reduce interference and increase channel reuse (see picture at right) Porter also invented the dial-then-send method used by all cell phones to reduce wasted channel time.
Telephony in Greater Manchester
In November 1877, while telephony was in its infancy, just 18 months after Alexander Graham Bell had made the world's first phone call, Charles Moseley, the son of a Manchester rubber manufacturer (then making telegraph equipment), took an interest in Bell's work. Moseley employed an engineer called William Fereday Bottomley to obtain telephone instruments from the Bell Company in Boston, United States, and provided the Post Office with its first telephones.
H.V. Dalling
He is most remembered because of his homemade telephone, which he constructed in 1885 and ran between his home on Richmond St. and his store on Main St. He supported the wires by running them in the branches of trees alongside the streets. Telephones (either wires or instruments) were not yet common in the region.
History of mobile phones
In the United States, engineers from Bell Labs began work on a system to allow mobile users to place and receive telephone calls from automobiles, leading to the inauguration of mobile service on June 17th 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri. Shortly after, AT&T offered "Mobile Telephone Service". A wide range of mostly incompatible mobile telephone services offered limited coverage area and only a few available channels in urban areas. The introduction of cellular technology, which allowed re-use of frequencies many times in small adjacent areas covered by relatively low powered transmitters, made widespread adoption of mobile telephones economically feasible.
Free-space optical communication
In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter created the photophone, at Bell's newly established Volta Laboratory in Washington, DC. Bell considered it his most important invention. The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light. On June 3, 1880, Bell conducted the world's first wireless telephone transmission between two buildings, some 213 meters (700 feet) apart.
Its first practical use came in military communication systems many decades later, first for optical telegraphy. German colonial troops used heliograph telegraphy transmitters during the Herero and Namaqua genocide starting in 1904, in German South-West Africa (today's Namibia) as did British, French, US or Ottoman signals. During the trench warfare of World War I when wire communications were often cut, German signals used three types of optical Morse transmitters called "", the intermediate type for distances of up to 4 km (2.5 miles) at daylight and of up to 8 km (5 miles) at night, using red filters for undetected communications. Optical telephone communications were tested at the end of the war, but not introduced at troop level. In addition, special blinkgeräts were used for communication with airplanes, balloons, and tanks, with varying success.
History of radio
In 1947 AT&T commercialized the Mobile Telephone Service. From its start in St. Louis in 1946, AT&T then introduced Mobile Telephone Service to one hundred towns and highway corridors by 1948. Mobile Telephone Service was a rarity with only 5,000 customers placing about 30,000 calls each week. Because only three radio channels were available, only three customers in any given city could make mobile telephone calls at one time. Mobile Telephone Service was expensive, costing US$15 per month, plus $0.30–0.40 per local call, equivalent to (in 2012 US dollars) about $176 per month and $3.50–4.75 per call. The Advanced Mobile Phone System analog mobile cell phone system, developed by Bell Labs, was introduced in the Americas in 1978, gave much more capacity. It was the primary analog mobile phone system in North America (and other locales) through the 1980s and into the 2000s.
In 1954, the Regency company introduced a pocket transistor radio, the TR-1, powered by a "standard 22.5 V Battery." In 1955, the newly formed Sony company introduced its first transistorized radio. It was small enough to fit in a vest pocket, powered by a small battery. It was durable, because it had no vacuum tubes to burn out. Over the next 20 years, transistors replaced tubes almost completely except for high-power transmitters.
Guelph
By 1886, telephones were quite common in the city. An April news article described the situation as follows. "Telephones are rapidly being introduced into private homes, where they prove a great convenience. Ladies order their groceries, consult their medical advisers, call their husbands home from the club and gossip with their friends by telephone."
Caving equipment
Communication between cavers and people on the surface may be essential for rescues or expeditions. Communication may be as simple as coded whistle blasts, though they are only effective across short distances and cannot be used in underwater caves. Telephones have been used in mines since at least June 1882, while the first record of telephones used in caving is from 1898. Édouard-Alfred Martel and his cousin Gabriel Gaupillat utilized lightweight telephones of with up to of wire to explore deep pitches.
However, it is possible that telephones were used in Lamb Leer caverns before February 1885, as there are references to a "talking machine" in use before this time.
Invention of the telephone
Bell did for the telephone what Henry Ford did for the automobile. Although not the first to experiment with telephonic devices, Bell and the companies founded in his name were the first to develop commercially practical telephones around which a successful business could be built and grow. Bell adopted carbon transmitters similar to Edison's transmitters and adapted telephone exchanges and switching plug boards developed for telegraphy. Watson and other Bell engineers invented numerous other improvements to telephony. Bell succeeded where others failed to assemble a commercially viable telephone system. It can be argued that Bell invented the telephone industry. Bell's first intelligible voice transmission over an electric wire was named an IEEE Milestone.
Telephony
The first telephones were connected directly in pairs. Each user had a separate telephone wired to the locations he or she might wish to reach. This quickly became inconvenient and unmanageable when people wanted to communicate with more than a few people. The inventions of the telephone exchange provided the solution for establishing telephone connections with any other telephone in service in the local area. Each telephone was connected to the exchange via one wire pair, the local loop. Nearby exchanges in other service areas were connected with trunk lines and long distance service could be established by relaying the calls through multiple exchanges.
History of videotelephony
The history of videotelephony covers the historical development of several technologies which enable the use of live video in addition to voice telecommunications. The concept of videotelephony was first popularized in the late 1870s in both the United States and Europe, although the basic sciences to permit its very earliest trials would take nearly a half century to be discovered. This was first embodied in the device which came to be known as the video telephone, or videophone, and it evolved from intensive research and experimentation in several telecommunication fields, notably electrical telegraphy, telephony, radio, and television.
Invention of the telephone
The invention of the telephone was the culmination of work done by many individuals, and led to an array of lawsuits relating to the patent claims of several individuals and numerous companies. The first telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci, but Alexander Graham Bell is credited with the development of the first practical telephone.
Invention of the telephone
In the 1880s Meucci was credited with the early invention of inductive loading of telephone wires to increase long-distance signals. Unfortunately, serious burns from an accident, a lack of English, and poor business abilities resulted in Meucci's failing to develop his inventions commercially in America. Meucci demonstrated some sort of instrument in 1849 in Havana, Cuba, however, this may have been a variant of a string telephone that used wire. Meucci has been further credited with the invention of an anti-sidetone circuit. However, examination showed that his solution to sidetone was to maintain two separate telephone circuits and thus use twice as many transmission wires. The anti-sidetone circuit later introduced by Bell Telephone instead canceled sidetone through a feedback process.
Invention of the telephone
Only a few months after receiving U.S. Patent No. 174465 at the beginning of March 1876, Bell conducted three important tests of his new invention and the telephone technology after returning to his parents' home at Melville House (now the Bell Homestead National Historic Site) for the summer.
Invention of the telephone
A later telephone design was publicly exhibited on May 4, 1877, at a lecture given by Professor Bell in the Boston Music Hall. According to a report quoted by John Munro in "Heroes of the Telegraph":
Going to the small telephone box with its slender wire attachments, Mr. Bell coolly asked, as though addressing someone in an adjoining room, "Mr. Watson, are you ready!" Mr. Watson, five miles away in Somerville, promptly answered in the affirmative, and soon was heard a voice singing "America". [...] Going to another instrument, connected by wire with Providence, forty-three miles distant, Mr. Bell listened a moment, and said, "Signor Brignolli, who is assisting at a concert in Providence Music Hall, will now sing for us." In a moment the cadence of the tenor's voice rose and fell, the sound being faint, sometimes lost, and then again audible. Later, a cornet solo played in Somerville was very distinctly heard. Still later, a three-part song came over the wire from Somerville, and Mr. Bell told his audience "I will switch off the song from one part of the room to another so that all can hear." At a subsequent lecture in Salem, Massachusetts, communication was established with Boston, eighteen miles distant, and Mr. Watson at the latter place sang "Auld Lang Syne", the National Anthem, and "Hail Columbia", while the audience at Salem joined in the chorus."
George Sweigert
The US Patent and Trademark Office issued US Patent 3,449,750 to Sweigert on June 10, 1969. The New York Times reported the award of the patent in the June 14th, 1969 edition. (page 52, column 6) In the article, Sweigert gives the first known printed description of how the "remote phone" might be used as a remote office or around the home, foreshadowing the way cell phones are used today. A friend told Sweigert that the article appeared in the Times, but Sweigert did not believe it completely until he received official word from the US Patent and Trademark Office later that week.
History of Western civilization
Western inventors and industrialists transformed the West in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The American Thomas Edison pioneered electricity and motion picture technology. Other American inventors, the Wright brothers, completed the first successful airplane flight in 1903. The first automobiles were also invented in this period. Petroleum became an important commodity after the discovery it could be used to power machines. Steel was developed in Britain by Henry Bessemer. This very strong metal, combined with the invention of elevators, allowed people to construct very tall buildings, called skyscrapers. In the late 19th century, the Italian Guglielmo Marconi was able to communicate across distances using radio. In 1876, the first telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, a British expatriate living in America. Many became very wealthy from this Second Industrial Revolution, including the American entrepreneurs Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Unions continued to fight for the rights of workers, and by 1914 laws limiting working hours and outlawing child labor had been passed in many Western countries.
Unbalanced line
Early telephone lines (telephone invented 1876) used the same transmission line scheme as telegraph of unbalanced single wires. However, telephone communication started to suffer after the widespread introduction of electrical power lines. Telephone transmission started to use balanced lines to combat this problem and the modern norm for telephone presentation is the balanced twisted pair cable.
Telephone directory
Telephone directories are a type of city directory. Books listing the inhabitants of an entire city were widely published starting in the 18th century, before the invention of the telephone.
Cordless telephone
Radio telephony (telephony without wires) predated cordless phones by at least 2 decades. The first, MTS, or Mobile Telephone Service went into service in 1946. Because the range was intended to cover the widest possible service area, capacity was extremely low, and the early tube technology made equipment rather large and heavy. The 2nd generation radio telephone, or IMTS, or Improved Mobile Telephone Service became active in 1964.
Timeline of United States inventions (1946–1991)
A mobile phone, or cell phone, is a long-range, electronic device used for mobile voice or data communication over a network of specialized base stations known as cell sites. Early mobile FM radio telephones were in use for many years, but since the number of radio frequencies were very limited in any area, the number of phone calls were also very limited. To solve this problem, there could be many small areas called cells which share the same frequencies. When users moved from one area to another while calling, the call would have to be switched over automatically without losing the call. In this system, a small number of radio frequencies could accommodate a huge number of calls. The first mobile call was made from a car phone in St. Louis, Missouri on June 17, 1946, but the system was impractical from what is considered a portable handset today. The equipment weighed 80 lbs, and the AT&T service, basically a massive party line, cost $30 per month plus 30 to 40 cents per local call. The basic network and supporting infrastructure of hexagonal cells used to support a mobile telephony system while remaining on the same channel were devised by Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young at AT&T Bell Labs in 1947. Finally in 1973, Martin Cooper invented the first handheld cellular/mobile phone. His first mobile phone call was made to Joel S. Engel in April 1973.
Invention of the telephone
The next day on August 4 another call was made between Brantford's telegraph office and Melville House, where a large dinner party exchanged "...speech, recitations, songs and instrumental music". To bring telephone signals to Melville House, Alexander Graham audaciously "bought up" and "cleaned up" the complete supply of stovepipe wire in Brantford. With the help of two of his parents' neighbours, he tacked the stovepipe wire some 400 metres (a quarter mile) along the top of fence posts from his parents' home to a junction point on the telegraph line to the neighbouring community of Mount Pleasant, which joined it to the Dominion Telegraph office in Brantford, Ontario.
Phone connector (audio)
Modern phone connectors are available in three standard sizes. The original version descends from as early as 1877, when the first-ever telephone switchboard was installed at 109 Court Street in Boston in a building owned by Charles Williams, Jr.; or 1878, when an early switchboard was used for the first commercial manual telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut created by George W. Coy. The 1877 switchboard was last known to be located in the lobby of 185 Franklin Street, Boston.
Mobile telephony
In 1947 Bell Labs was the first to propose a cellular radio telephone network. The primary innovation was the development of a network of small overlapping cell sites supported by a call switching infrastructure that tracks users as they move through a network and passes their calls from one site to another without dropping the connection. In 1956 the MTA system was launched in Sweden. The early efforts to develop mobile telephony faced two significant challenges: allowing a great number of callers to use the comparatively few available frequencies simultaneously and allowing users to seamlessly move from one area to another without having their calls dropped. Both problems were solved by Bell Labs employee Amos Joel who, in 1970 applied for a patent for a mobile communications system. However, a business consulting firm calculated the entire U.S. market for mobile telephones at 100,000 units and the entire worldwide market at no more than 200,000 units based on the ready availability of pay telephones and the high cost of constructing cell towers. As a consequence, Bell Labs concluded that the invention was "of little or no consequence," leading it not to attempt to commercialize the invention. The invention earned Joel induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008. The first call on a handheld mobile phone was made on April 3, 1973 by Martin Cooper, then of Motorola to his opposite number in Bell Labs who were also racing to be first. Bell Labs went on to install the first trial cellular network in Chicago in 1978. This trial system was licensed by the FCC to ATT for commercial use in 1982 and, as part of the divestiture arrangements for the breakup of ATT, the AMPS technology was distributed to local telcos. The first commercial system opened in Chicago in October 1983. A system designed by Motorola also operated in the Washington D.C./Baltimore area from summer 1982 and became a full public service later the following year. Japan's first commercial radiotelephony service was launched by NTT in 1978.
History of the telephone
The modern telephone is the result of work of many people. Alexander Graham Bell was, however, the first to patent the telephone, as an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically". Bell has most often been credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone. However, in Germany Johann Philipp Reis is seen as a leading telephone pioneer who stopped only just short of a successful device, and as well the Italian-American inventor and businessman Antonio Meucci has been recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives for his contributory work on the telephone. Several other controversies also surround the question of priority of invention for the telephone.
Industrial history of Monterrey
In 1882, the telephone was installed in the city of Monterrey. The purpose of the first line of telephones was for the use of the government, connecting the house of General Treviño with the headquarters in the city. The use of telephones for public purposes was established in 1883. By the next year, it already had 91 subscriptions, 256 telephone devices, and 300 kilometers of telephone line.
History of the telephone
Among the earliest known experiments were those conducted by the British physicist and polymath Robert Hooke from 1664 to 1685. An acoustic string phone made in 1667 is attributed to him.
History of videotelephony
Barely two years after the telephone was first patented in the United States in 1876 by Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, an early concept of a combined videophone and wide-screen television called a "telephonoscope" was conceptualized in the popular periodicals of the day. It was also mentioned in various early science fiction works such as "Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique" (The 20th century. The electrical life) and other works written by Albert Robida, and was also sketched in various cartoons by George du Maurier as a fictional invention of Thomas Edison. One such sketch was published on December 9, 1878 in "Punch" magazine.
Alexander Graham Bell
Bell began a series of public demonstrations and lectures to introduce the new invention to the scientific community as well as the general public. A short time later, his demonstration of an early telephone prototype at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia brought the telephone to international attention. Influential visitors to the exhibition included Emperor Pedro II of Brazil. Later, Bell had the opportunity to demonstrate the invention personally to Sir William Thomson (later, Lord Kelvin), a renowned Scottish scientist, as well as to Queen Victoria, who had requested a private audience at Osborne House, her Isle of Wight home. She called the demonstration "most extraordinary". The enthusiasm surrounding Bell's public displays laid the groundwork for universal acceptance of the revolutionary device.
Public switched telephone network
Commercialization of the telephone began in 1876, with instruments operated in pairs for private use between two locations. Users who wanted to communicate with persons at multiple locations had as many telephones as necessary for the purpose. Alerting another user of the desire to establish a telephone call was accomplished by whistling loudly into the transmitter until the other party heard the alert. Bells were soon added to stations for signaling, so an attendant no longer needed to wait for the whistle.
Bell Homestead National Historic Site
On a test call one week earlier on 3 August 1876, Alexander Graham's uncle, Professor David Charles Bell, spoke to him from the Brantford telegraph office, reciting lines from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (""To be or not to be...""). The young inventor, positioned at the A. Wallis Ellis store in the neighbouring community of Mount Pleasant, listened to his uncle's voice emanating from his receiver housed in a metal box. Initially David Bell's voice couldn't be heard distinctly as "...all kinds and sizes of wire were used in stringing from the house to Mount Pleasant road". However, Walter Griffin, the Dominion Telegraph manager, decided to attach the telegraph line to a battery to see if it would improve the transmission, which it did, and "the voices then came in distinctly." That first Brantford call was followed the next day on 4 August during another call between Brantford's telegraph office and Melville House when a large dinner party, including members of the Cowherd family who would later manufacture phones for Bell in Canada's first telephone factory, provided "...speech, recitations, songs and instrumental music" that were transmitted to the Bell Homestead. To bring telephone signals to Melville House, Alexander Graham audaciously "bought up" and "cleaned up" the complete supply of stovepipe wire within Brantford. With the help of two of Melville's neighbours, E. McIntyre and Thomas Brooks, he tacked the stovepipe wire some 800 metres (a half mile) along the top of fence posts from his parent's home to a junction point on the Mount Pleasant telegraph line, which joined that community to the Dominion Telegraph office in Brantford.
Telekom Malaysia
The British, who had a presence in Malaysia from the 18th century, were responsible for setting up the country's earliest telecommunications facilities, which over time evolved into TM. First establishing telegraph lines under the Posts & Telegraphs Department, telephones made their debut in the late 19th century, the earliest hand-cranked Magneto operated devices being used in Perak in the 1880s. The first public telephone exchange in the country was also set up in Ipoh, in 1902.
History of telecommunication
Telephone technology grew quickly after the first commercial services emerged, with inter-city lines being built and telephone exchanges in every major city of the United States by the mid-1880s. The first transcontinental telephone call occurred on January 25, 1915. Despite this, transatlantic voice communication remained impossible for customers until January 7, 1927 when a connection was established using radio. However no cable connection existed until TAT-1 was inaugurated on September 25, 1956 providing 36 telephone circuits.
Telephone token
Phone tokens started in Chicago, where public phones would accept only tokens. These were used in the U.S. until 1944 when they were eliminated and most of the tokens were melted down to make shell casings. The earliest-known telephone token dates from 1885, when it was produced for the PAN Telephone Company in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rather than being deposited in the phone, the token was given to an attendant or placed in a coin box to gain access to the phone booth.
Obadiah Bowen
Bowen's father homesteaded Obadiah Place (Bowen Residence) in 1913. His original log cabin was a community meeting place, post office, and site of the first telephone. In 1938, his son Obadiah Bowen replaced the cabin, building a house. It was recognized as an Alberta historic site in 1999.
Trimphone
Production of the new telephone commenced in 1965 by STC, and an initial quantity of 1000 was offered to customers on a selective trial basis in the London North West Telephone Area in the same year. It became available throughout the country in 1968, at extra rental cost, with a choice of three two-tone colour schemes: grey-white, grey-green and two-tone blue. The first example of the Trimphone was presented in May 1965 by the Postmaster General, Tony Benn, to a newlywed couple in Hampstead in a ceremony marking the ten millionth telephone to be installed in Britain. By 1980 there were 1.6 million Trimphones in use out of a total telephone population at that time of 27 million.
Invention of the telephone
Elisha Gray, of Highland Park, Illinois (near Chicago) also devised a tone telegraph of this kind about the same time as La Cour. In Gray's tone telegraph, several vibrating steel reeds tuned to different frequencies interrupted the current, which at the other end of the line passed through electromagnets and vibrated matching tuned steel reeds near the electromagnet poles. Gray's 'harmonic telegraph,' with vibrating reeds, was used by the Western Union Telegraph Company. Since more than one set of vibration frequencies – that is to say, more than one musical tone – can be sent over the same wire simultaneously, the harmonic telegraph can be utilized as a 'multiplex' or many-ply telegraph, conveying several messages through the same wire at the same time. Each message can either be read by an operator by the sound, or from different tones read by different operators, or a permanent record can be made by the marks drawn on a ribbon of traveling paper by a Morse recorder. On July 27, 1875, Gray was granted U.S. patent 166,096 for "Electric Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones" (the harmonic)
Hugh Cossart Baker Jr.
On June 20, 1877, "Hugh Cossart Baker Jr." started up the first commercial telephone service in Canada in the city of Hamilton, Ontario. Then in 1878, he made the first telephone exchange in the British Empire. This was also the second telephone exchange in all of North America. The following season on 15 May 1879 he made Hamilton the site of the first commercial long distance telephone line in the British Empire. In 1880, (April 29) Hugh Cossart Baker Jr. received a charter to build a national telephone company in Hamilton, Ontario. It was called the "Hamilton Telephone Company" and this was the charter that enabled the creation of the Bell Telephone Company in Canada. Hugh Cossart Baker Jr. became the manager of the Ontario division until he retired in 1909. The first telephone had been leased to Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie in September 1877. Baker learned of Alexander Graham Bell's invention in 1877 at the Philadelphia International Exposition and from there decided to test the communication tool in Hamilton. He leased four telephones for himself and his chess partners and on August 29, 1877, the telephone replaced the telegraph as the means to discuss their chess moves. Baker is also credited with helping to create the Hamilton Street Railway Company, the Hamilton Real Estate Association and the Canada Fire and Marine Insurance Company - all before he was 30 years old.
History of infrastructure
The electrical telegraph was first successfully demonstrated on 25 July 1837 between Euston and Camden Town in London. It entered commercial use on the Great Western Railway over the from Paddington station to West Drayton on 9 April 1839. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell achieved the first successful telephone transmission of clear speech. Soon, a bell was added for signalling, and then a switch-hook, and telephones took advantage of the exchange principle already employed in telegraph networks.
Johann Philipp Reis
Besides Reis and Bell, many others claimed to have invented the telephone. The result was the Gray-Bell telephone controversy, one of the United States' longest running patent interference cases, involving Bell, Thomas Alva Edison, Elisha Gray, Emil Berliner, Amos Dolbear, J. W. McDonagh, G. B. Richmond, W. L. Voeker, J. H. Irwin, and Francis Blake Jr. The case started in 1878 and was not finalised until February 27, 1901. Bell and the Bell Telephone Company triumphed in this crucial decision, as well as every one of the over 600 other court decisions related to the invention of the telephone. The Bell Telephone Company never lost a case that had proceeded to a final trial stage.
Police box
The first police telephone was installed in Albany, New York in 1877, one year after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Call boxes for use by both police and trusted members of the public were first installed in Chicago in 1880, initially housed in kiosks to protect the inner signal boxes from the weather and to limit access to them so as to discourage false alarms. In 1883, Washington, DC installed its own system; Detroit installed police call boxes in 1884, and in 1885, Boston followed suit. These were direct line telephones usually placed inside a metal box on a post which could often be accessed by a key or breaking a glass panel. In Chicago, the telephones were restricted to police use, but the boxes also contained a dial mechanism which members of the public could use to signal different types of alarms via telegraph: there were 11 signals, including "Police Wagon Required", "Thieves", "Forgers", "Murder", "Accident", "Fire" and "Drunkard".
History of mobile phones
Prior to 1973, mobile telephony was limited to phones installed in cars and other vehicles. Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone. On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, his rival. The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Cooper weighed and measured . The prototype offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge.
Telephone
Before the development of the electric telephone, the term "telephone" was applied to other inventions, and not all early researchers of the electrical device called it "telephone". A communication device for sailing vessels "The Telephone" was the invention of a captain John Taylor in 1844. This instrument used four air horns to communicate with vessels in foggy weather. Later, c. 1860, Johann Philipp Reis used the term in reference to his Reis telephone, his device appears to be the first such device based on conversion of sound into electrical impulses, the term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the , "tēle", "far" and φωνή, "phōnē", "voice", together meaning "distant voice".
History of the telephone
The following is a brief summary of the history of the development of the telephone:Early telephones were technically diverse. Some used liquid transmitters which soon went out of use. Some were dynamic: their diaphragms vibrated a coil of wire in the field of a permanent magnet or vice versa. Such sound-powered telephones survived in small numbers through the 20th century in military and maritime applications where the ability to create its own electrical power was crucial. Most, however, used Edison/Berliner carbon transmitters, which were much louder than the other kinds, even though they required induction coils, actually acting as impedance matching transformers to make it compatible to the line impedance. The Edison patents kept the Bell monopoly viable into the 20th century, by which time telephone networks were more important than the instrument.
Reis telephone
In 1862, Reis demonstrated his telephone to Wilhelm von Legat, Inspector of the Royal Prussian Telegraph Corps who produced an account of it (Legat, 1862), a translation of which was obtained by Thomas Edison in 1875 and which was used in Edison's successful development of the carbon microphone. The Legat account included drawings that are different from that below, suggesting that it is of a later version. Edison acknowledged his debt to Reis thus:
The first inventor of a telephone was Phillip Reis of Germany only musical not articulating. The first person to publicly exhibit a telephone for transmission of articulate speech was A. G. Bell. The first practical commercial telephone for transmission of articulate speech was invented by myself. Telephones used throughout the world are mine and Bell's. Mine is used for transmitting. Bell's is used for receiving. (Edison 2006, [LB020312 TAEM 83:170])
Massachusetts
Alexander Graham Bell is commonly credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone. On March 10, 1876 at Boston University, he was able to communicate with his assistant Thomas A. Watson in the next room.
Telegraphy
Telegraph use began to permanently decline around 1920. The decline began with the growth of the use of the telephone. Ironically, the invention of the telephone grew out of the development of the harmonic telegraph, a device which was supposed to increase the efficiency of telegraph transmission and improve the profits of telegraph companies. Western Union gave up their patent battle with Alexander Graham Bell because they believed the telephone was not a threat to their telegraph business. The Bell Telephone Company was formed in 1877 and had 230 subscribers which grew to 30,000 by 1880. By 1886 there were a quarter of a million phones worldwide, and nearly 2 million by 1900. The decline was briefly postponed by the rise of special occasion congratulatory telegrams. Traffic continued to grow between 1867 and 1893 despite the introduction of the telephone in this period, but by 1900 the telegraph was definitely in decline.
Wireless
The world's first wireless telephone conversation occurred in 1880, when Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter invented and patented the photophone, a telephone that conducted audio conversations wirelessly over modulated light beams (which are narrow projections of electromagnetic waves). In that distant era, when utilities did not yet exist to provide electricity and lasers had not even been imagined in science fiction, there were no practical applications for their invention, which was highly limited by the availability of both sunlight and good weather. Similar to free-space optical communication, the photophone also required a clear line of sight between its transmitter and its receiver. It would be several decades before the photophone's principles found their first practical applications in military communications and later in fiber-optic communications.
Invention of the telephone
In the first test call on August 3, 1876, Alexander Graham's uncle, Professor David Charles Bell, spoke to him from the Brantford telegraph office, reciting lines from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (""To be or not to be...""). The young inventor, positioned at the A. Wallis Ellis store in the neighboring community of Mount Pleasant, received and may possibly have transferred his uncle's voice onto a phonautogram, a drawing made on a pen-like recording device that could produce the shapes of sound waves as waveforms onto smoked glass or other media by tracing their vibrations.
History of telecommunication
The history of telecommunication began with the use of smoke signals and drums in Africa, the Americas and parts of Asia. 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.
History of the telephone
The history of mobile phones can be traced back to two-way radios permanently installed in vehicles such as taxicabs, police cruisers, railroad trains, and the like. Later versions such as the so-called transportables or "bag phones" were equipped with a cigarette lighter plug so that they could also be carried, and thus could be used as either mobile two-way radios or as portable phones by being patched into the telephone network.
Telephony in Greater Manchester
Bell himself had first demonstrated the telephone to Queen Victoria who placed the UK's first long distance call from Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, on 14 January 1878. Just twelve days later, after obtaining a licence from the Post Office, Moseley installed a telephone between a hardware merchants establishment (Thomas Hudson Ltd) on Shudehill, Manchester to the companies' offices on Dantzic Street: the first such telephone in regular use in the country
History of the telephone
The District Telephone Company of New Haven went into operation with only twenty-one subscribers, who paid $1.50 per month. By 21 February 1878, however, when the first telephone directory was published by the company, fifty subscribers were listed. Most of these were businesses and listings such as physicians, the police, and the post office; only eleven residences were listed, four of which were for persons associated with the company.
History of the telephone
Starting in the 1930s, the base of the telephone also enclosed its bell and induction coil, obviating the need for a separate ringer box. Power was supplied to each subscriber line by central office batteries instead of the user's local battery which required periodic service. For the next half century, the network behind the telephone grew progressively larger and much more efficient, and after the rotary dial was added the instrument itself changed little until Touch-Tone signaling started replacing the rotary dial in the 1960s.
Push-button telephone
The concept of push-buttons in telephony originated around 1887 with a device called the micro-telephone push-button, but it was not an automatic dialing system as understood later. This use even predated the invention of the rotary dial by Almon Brown Strowger in 1891. The Bell System in the United States relied on manual switched service until 1919, when it reversed its decisions and embraced dialed, automatic switching. The 1951 introduction of direct distance dialing required automatic transmission of dialed numbers between distant exchanges, leading to use of inband multi-frequency signaling within the Long Lines network while individual local subscribers continued to dial using standard pulses.
Mobile phone
A handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a "pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone". Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from ships and trains. The race to create truly portable telephone devices began after World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. The advances in mobile telephony have been traced in successive "generations", starting with the early zeroth-generation (0G) services, such as Bell System's Mobile Telephone Service and its successor, the Improved Mobile Telephone Service. These 0G systems were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, and were very expensive.
The first handheld cellular mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing . The first commercial automated cellular network (1G) analog was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1979. This was followed in 1981 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Several other countries then followed in the early to mid-1980s. These first-generation (1G) systems could support far more simultaneous calls but still used analog cellular technology. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone.
Mobile Telecommunication Company of Iran
As a personal communication means, the telephone network has the highest application in the world. The possibility of provision of mobile phone has emerged in 1960 in Scandinavian states (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland) in 1960s. By the end of the decade the first point to point telephone was used and this was a turning point in telecommunication industry and thereby one of mankind's dreams was realized.
The technology was introduced to the market by Scandinavian states to the market by use of analog technology. The first mobile telephone network (Nordic Mobile Telephone – NMT) was introduced by these states. In early 1980s, the use of digital telephone in automobile was put into the agenda.
Paris, Ontario
While the telephone was invented at Brantford, Ontario, in 1874, Alexander Graham Bell reminded people in the area about a Paris connection. "Brantford is right in claiming the invention of the telephone" and "the first transmission to a distance was made between Brantford and Paris" (on 3 August 1876).
History of the telephone
The earliest telephones had only one wire for both transmitting and receiving of audio, and used a ground return path, as was found in telegraph systems. The earliest dynamic telephones also had only one opening for sound, and the user alternately listened and spoke (rather, shouted) into the same hole. Sometimes the instruments were operated in pairs at each end, making conversation more convenient but also more expensive.
At first, the benefits of a "switchboard" exchange were not exploited. Instead, telephones were leased in pairs to the subscriber, for example one for his home and one for his shop, and the subscriber had to arrange with telegraph contractors to construct a line between them. Users who wanted the ability to speak to three or four different shops, suppliers etc. would obtain and set up three or four pairs of telephones. Western Union, already using telegraph exchanges, quickly extended the principle to its telephones in New York City and San Francisco, and Bell was not slow in appreciating the potential.
Telephony
Starting with the introduction of the transistor, invented in 1947 by Bell Laboratories, to amplification and switching circuits in the 1950s, and through development of computer-based electronic switching systems, the public switched telephone network (PSTN) has gradually evolved towards automation and digitization of signaling and audio transmissions.
Mobile phone
The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c. 2 kilograms (4.4 lbs). In 1979, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) launched the world's first cellular network in Japan. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion—enough to provide one for every person on Earth. In first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone developers worldwide were Samsung, Apple, and Huawei, and smartphone sales represented 78 percent of total mobile phone sales. For feature phones (or "dumbphones") , the largest were Samsung, Nokia, and Alcatel.
Rotary dial
The first commercial installation of a telephone dial accompanied the first commercial installation of a 99-line automatic telephone exchange in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892, which was based on the 1891 Strowger designs. The original dials required complex operational sequences. A workable, albeit error-prone, system was invented by the Automatic Electric Company using three push-buttons on the telephone. These buttons represented the hundreds, tens, and single units of a telephone number. When calling the subscriber number 163, for example, the user had to push the hundreds button once, followed by six presses of the tens button, and three presses of the units button. In 1896, this system was supplanted by an automatic "contact-making machine", or "calling device". Further development continued during the 1890s and the early 1900s in conjunction with improvements in switching technology.
History of infrastructure
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell achieved the first successful telephone transmission of clear speech. The first telephones had no network, but were in private use, wired together in pairs. Users who wanted to talk to different people had as many telephones as necessary for the purpose. A user who wished to speak, whistled into the transmitter until the other party heard. Soon, however, a bell was added for signalling, and then a switch-hook, and telephones took advantage of the exchange principle already employed in telegraph networks. Each telephone was wired to a local telephone exchange, and the exchanges were wired together with trunks. Networks were connected together in a hierarchical manner until they spanned cities, countries, continents, and oceans.
History of the telephone
The electrical telegraph was first commercialised by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and entered use on the Great Western Railway in England. It ran for from Paddington station to West Drayton and came into operation on April 9, 1839.
Amplifier
The first practical device that could amplify was the triode vacuum tube, invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest, which led to the first amplifiers around 1912. Vacuum tubes were used in almost all amplifiers until the 1960s–1970s when the transistor, invented in 1947, replaced them. Today, most amplifiers use transistors, but vacuum tubes continue to be used in some applications.
The development of audio communication technology in form of the telephone, first patented in 1876, created the need to increase the amplitude of electrical signals to extend the transmission of signals over increasingly long distances. In telegraphy, this problem had been solved with intermediate devices at stations that replenished the dissipated energy by operating a signal recorder and transmitter back-to-back, forming a relay, so that a local energy source at each intermediate station powered the next leg of transmission.
For duplex transmission, i.e. sending and receiving in both directions, bi-directional relay repeaters were developed starting with the work of C. F. Varley for telegraphic transmission. Duplex transmission was essential for telephony and the problem was not satisfactorily solved until 1904, when H. E. Shreeve of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company improved existing attempts at constructing a telephone repeater consisting of back-to-back carbon-granule transmitter and electrodynamic receiver pairs. The Shreeve repeater was first tested on a line between Boston and Amesbury, MA, and more refined devices remained in service for some time. After the turn of the century it was found that negative resistance mercury lamps could amplify, and were also tried in repeaters, with little success.
Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy
After largely abandoning his telephone experiments, fourteen months later on February 11, 1876, Gray . On February 14, Gray's lawyer with a similar diagram. The same day, Bell's lawyer filed (hand-delivered to the U.S. Patent Office) a patent application on the harmonic telegraph, including its use for transmitting vocal sounds. On February 19, the patent office suspended Bell's application for three months to give Gray time to submit a full patent application with claims, after which the patent office would begin interference proceedings to determine whether Bell or Gray were first to invent the claimed subject matter of the telephone.
Bell Canada
In the mid-1870s Alexander Graham Bell, who was Scottish-born but lived in Canada, invented an analogue electromagnetic telecommunication device that could simultaneously transmit and receive human speech. In March 1876 he successfully patented his invention in the United States under the title of "Improvement In Telegraphy" (). His device later adopted the name now used worldwide, the telephone. Bell also patented it in Canada and transferred 75% of the Canadian patent rights to his father, Alexander Melville Bell, with the remaining 25% of the Canadian interest being awarded to Boston telephone manufacturer Charles Williams Jr. in exchange for 1,000 telephones to be provided to the Canadian market, an order that could not be fulfilled due to surging demand in the United States.
Bell Homestead National Historic Site
The event being celebrated was Alexander Graham Bell's "three great tests of the telephone", which culminated with the call he received on 10 August 1876 in Paris, from his father and others speaking to him from the Dominion Telegraph Office in Brantford. For that long distance test the younger Bell set up a telephone using telegraph lines at Robert White's Boot and Shoe Store running through the Dominion Telegraph office in Paris. The normal telegraph line of about 13 km (8 miles) length between Paris and Brantford was extended a further 93 km (58 miles) to Toronto to allow the use of a battery in its telegraph office. A similar celebration organized by the Telephone Pioneers of America had been held earlier on the telephone call's 91st anniversary in August 1967, with the ceremonies being broadcast live from the site by a microwave transmitter.
History of the telephone
In December 1947, Bell Labs engineers Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young proposed hexagonal cell transmissions for mobile phones. Philip T. Porter, also of Bell Labs, proposed that the cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas that would transmit/receive in 3 directions (see picture at right) into 3 adjacent hexagon cells. The technology did not exist then and the radio frequencies had not yet been allocated. Cellular technology was undeveloped until the 1960s, when Richard H. Frenkiel and Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs developed the electronics.
Charles Williams Jr. House
The Charles Williams Jr. House, built in 1858, is a historic house at 1 Arlington Street in Somerville, Massachusetts. Charles Williams Jr. was a manufacturer of electrical telegraph instruments at 109 Court Street in Boston. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson experimented with the telephone in Williams' shop, and it was there that they first heard indistinct sounds transmitted on June 2, 1875. The first permanent residential telephone service in the world was installed at this house in 1877, connecting Williams' home with his shop on Court Street in Boston. Williams had telephone Numbers 1 and 2 of the Bell Telephone Company.
Isawa Shūji
Sometime prior to January 20, 1877, Isawa became the first person to use a language other than English on the telephone. According to Bell, the telephone's inventor, "...a young Japanese student named Isawa...came to me for the purpose of studying the pronunciation of English. Of course, when he heard about the telephone he became very much interested. He said, “Mr. Bell, will this thing talk Japanese?” I said, “Certainly, any language.” He seemed very much astonished at that, and said he would like to try it. Mr. Isawa went to one end of the circuit and I stood at the other. He talked in Japanese and I reported the result to him. "
Invention of the telephone
The first American demonstration of Meucci's invention took place in Staten Island, New York in 1854. In 1861, a description of it was reportedly published in an Italian-language New York newspaper, although no known copy of that newspaper issue or article has survived to the present day. Meucci claimed to have invented a paired electromagnetic transmitter and receiver, where the motion of a diaphragm modulated a signal in a coil by moving an electromagnet, although this was not mentioned in his 1871 U.S. patent caveat. A further discrepancy observed was that the device described in the 1871 caveat employed only a single conduction wire, with the telephone's transmitter-receivers being insulated from a 'ground return' path.
Telephone
In 1876, shortly after the telephone was invented, Hungarian engineer Tivadar Puskás invented the telephone switch, which allowed for the formation of telephone exchanges, and eventually networks.Early telephones were technically diverse. Some used a water microphone, some had a metal diaphragm that induced current in an electromagnet wound around a permanent magnet, and some were dynamic – their diaphragm vibrated a coil of wire in the field of a permanent magnet or the coil vibrated the diaphragm. The sound-powered dynamic variants survived in small numbers through the 20th century in military and maritime applications, where its ability to create its own electrical power was crucial. Most, however, used the Edison/Berliner carbon transmitter, which was much louder than the other kinds, even though it required an induction coil which was an impedance matching transformer to make it compatible with the impedance of the line. The Edison patents kept the Bell monopoly viable into the 20th century, by which time the network was more important than the instrument.