The very first telephone calls on the fledgling service had to be connected directly between subscribers phones and telephone wire were sold in pairs. Justice Department ordered AT&T to break up into regional and local providers (the so-called “Baby Bells”) in a landmark antitrust lawsuit, and to allow more robust competition. AT&T would control all long-distance telephone service until the 1980’s, when the U.S. Ironically, it was the attempt to break Western Union’s monopoly on telegram service which led to a complete monopoly on the first telephone service. Bell’s control of the intellectual property and patents allowed him to buy out telephone service competitors which sprang up, leading to the mergers which formed the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, later simplified to AT&T. Just 3 years later, by the end of 1880, there were almost 50,000 telephones in the United States alone.Īlthough Bell started his first company, the Bell Telephone Company, in 1877, the nascent industry grew by leaps and bounds. The men then became embroiled in a legal dispute over who had the rights to the invention, but since both devices were substantially similar, the fact that Bell had gotten there first meant the patent would go to him.īy 1877, just a year after Bell patented the telephone (on March 7, 1876), the first regular telephone line was completed, from Boston to Somerville, Massachusetts. The two men both rushed to the patent office to register the invention, with Bell arriving just hours before Gray. Watson, come here–I want to see you.”īy an incredible coincidence, Bell and another inventor, Elisha Gray, had both created the invention that would lead to the telephone (Bell called his the “liquid transmitter”) right around the same time. Before long, he would speak the famous first words via telephone to Watson from one room to another: “Mr. Bell had been quietly working to develop something akin to a telephone for some time, but this was the breakthrough he needed to make the device a reality. While working on what they were calling the “harmonic telegram”, Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, accidentally triggered the reproduction of sound over the wire between two linked devices. The first patented telephone wasn’t actually a telephone at all. It was in the course of work on this multiple telegram system that Bell would discover, quite by accident, the means to transmit sound over electrical wires. One such individual, an attorney from Boston named Gardiner Greene Hubbard, future father-in-law of inventor Alexander Graham Bell, provided funding to the young entrepreneur to create a system for transmitting multiple telegrams along the same wire at the same time via means of varying the frequency of transmissions. Many large companies and entrepreneurs resented the monopolistic stranglehold that Western Union held over telegraph communication. However, it would take some time for the devices to become sufficiently powerful, small enough to be usable, and for a network of transmitters and receivers to be developed in order for radio to become the ubiquitous medium for one-way and two-way communication that it would, long beyond the invention of television. Predecessors were the Italian innovator Antonio Meucci, who invented the first simple telephone in 1849, and Charles Bourseul of France in 1854, who also came up with a very early example of the technology.Įarly versions of radio technology also existed at the time. While Alexander Graham Bell is typically credited with the invention of the telephone, he was just the first to receive a U.S. Telegraph lines ran alongside electrical wires, themselves a relatively new phenomenon, in the latter half of the 19th century. The simple telegraph was the most common, with wires criss-crossing the United States strung up by the Western Union Telegraph Company. Prior to the telephone’s invention, there were a tremendous number of active and experimental technologies in the field of wired and wireless communication.
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