The idea of the telephone and the word telephone has been around for a long time, for there has always been the need to communicate. We’ve all heard Alexander Graham Bell’s story, but here’s a brief history and some interesting facts from the early years of telephone.

The word telephone comes from Greek roots meaning "far speaking." It seems to have been used first in Germany in 1796 to describe a system of directive megaphones that did not use electricity. In 1821, Sir Charles Wheatstone used the word "telephonic" in connection with his "enchanted lyre," which transmitted music    acoustically by means of rods of wood, glass, or metal. Over the next fifty years, several inventors unsuccessfully attempted to produce a "far speaking" device

Telegraph companies set the stage for telephones

Around 1872, telegraph companies began to search for a way to send multiple telegraphic messages over the same line to avoid having to install multiple lines. Alexander  Graham Bell, a speech teacher of the deaf and part-time telegraph inventor; Thomas Alva Edison, a former Western Union Telegraph Company employee and freelance electrical inventor; and Elisha Gray, a telegraph-line superintendent for Western Electric and telegraph inventor; independently experimented with ways to accomplish the needed multiple telegraphic transmissions. Each man devised a harmonic telegraph capable of transmitting and receiving various frequencies. From these experiments, they concluded that transmitting and receiving the human voice was also possible.

Bell did his experimenting in an electrical shop in Boston. His now famous assistant was of course, Thomas A. Watson, a machinist. The two worked feverishly on their experiments, always feeling they were on the verge of a great discovery and knowing that their competition was as well.

Accident brings breakthrough discovery

A great breakthrough, actually an accident, came in 1875. While testing the harmonic telegraph device between two rooms in the electrical shop, Bell heard a faint but distinct sound made when Watson plucked at stuck receiving reeds. They were now in hot pursuit of the telephone. After repetitions and variations of the experiment, Bell sketched the first electric speaking telephone.

It consisted of a wooden frame on which a harmonic receiver with one end of its steel-reed armature touched a tightly stretched membrane of parchment. Watson built the device which is known in telephone history as the  "gallows" telephone (because of the shape of the wooden frame). Unfortunately, it was a disheartening and anticlimactic failure. Still, the two pressed on, working on  patent specifications and trying to perfect the gallows-type electromagnetic telephone transmitter that had  failed so disappointingly.

Patent proves to be one of history’s most valuable

On the morning of February 14, 1876, Bell filed the patent that would make him a millionaire. The patent was entitled "Improvements in Telegraphy" and did not even mention the word "telephone." A few hours later that same day, Elisha Gray went to the same patent office and filed a "caveat," or warning to other inventors, that he was working on a "far speaking telephone." On those lucky few hours’ priority rested Bell’s legal claim to the telephone patent aunarguably one of history’s most valuable patents and hotly contested.

Bell and Watson continued to work furiously to produce a working telephone. In March, Bell was trying to transmit the sound of a tuning fork by magneto-induction, when he suddenly took a new tack. He replaced the electromagnet with a dish of water containing sulfuric acid, introducing the variable-resistance principle. The tuning fork was plucked, and Bell heard a faint sound. He added more acid, and the sound became louder. Watson built a new transmitter in which a wire, attached to a diaphragm, touched acidulated water in a metal cup; one would speak downward into the diaphragm, whose vibration would cause the wire’s depth of immersion into the water to vary and set up varying resistance in the battery-powered circuit.

Mr. Watson come here...

The transmitter was setup, its cup filled with acid water ready for testing Bell in one room, Watson in the other. Of the infamous moment Watson later wrote,  "Almost at once I was astonished to hear Bell’s voice ... distinctly saying, ‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!’ ... I rushed down the hall into his room and found he had  upset the acid of a battery over his clothes. He forgot the accident in his joy over the success of the new transmitter."

After several experiments and adjustments, Bell’s improved version of the telephone made its commercial debut in 1877, and Bell Telephone Company, was born. However, a carbon-contact transmitter invented by Thomas Edison and patented in England to outmaneuver American patent restrictions would eventually replace Bell’s less efficient transmitter.

Bell offered to sell his patent to Western Union for $100,000, but the telegraph company instead bought Elisha Gray and Edison’s patents and began to build a telephone network called the American Speaking Telephone Company. Bell sued Western Union for infringement in 1878. The case was finally settled in 1879 with Bell assuming the rights to Western Union’s telephone patents and agreeing to pay the company a fee during the 17-year life of each patent. Both companies agreed not to  become involved in one another’s business.

It’s just a toy!

Bell’s "speaking telephone" was not universally welcomed. Some people dismissed it as a scientific toy of  little value. Others saw it as an invasion of privacy. However, the telephone began to make its way into society, catching the public imagination.

Getting connected was a major hurdle. Eventually, the   industry adopted the concept of a central office (a telegraph operation technique) for interconnection. In January 1878, a board connecting all 21 telephones in New Haven, Connecticut was placed in service. As interconnection problems were solved, telephone use began to catch on. By spring 1880, 138 exchanges served 30,000 subscribers in the U.S. By 1887, nearly 146,000 miles of wire connected more than 150,000 subscribers to 743 main and 44 branch exchanges.

However, the early years were fraught with troubles.  Gophers caused problems in the Midwest by chewing through the insulation on telephone wires. In the Southwest, cowboys used insulators for target practice. Transmission was difficult because of the primitive equipment and then there was the disaster of male operators.

Young men, usually in their teens, manned the first telephone exchanges. Their unreliability and rudeness caused the telephone companies to seek a more reliable and polite sort to serve their valuable customers. Help came in the guise of society’s well mannered and bustled young ladies. In 1878, Emma M. Nutt was hired by the New England Bell Company in Boston as the first woman operator starting the trend of ‘women only’ operators that would continue well into the 1960’s.

Measles epidemic brings first numbering system

In 1879, telephone subscribers began to be designated by numbers rather than names the result of a measles epidemic. A Massachusetts doctor, concerned about the inability of replacement exchange operators to put calls through because they would not be familiar with the names associated with all the jacks on the switchboards, suggested the alphanumeric system of identifying customers by a two-letter and five-digit system.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), a subsidiary of the American Bell Telephone Company, was established in 1885 to provide long distance connections among the growing Bell companies. At the turn of the century, AT&T would be reorganized into the holding company for all the Bell companies.

In 1888, Hammond V. Hayes developed a common battery system which permitted a central battery to supply all telephones on an exchange with power, rather than relying upon each unit’s own troublesome battery. The first automatic dialing system was patented in 1891 by a Kansas City undertaker, Almon Strowger, who believed that operators were sending his business to competitors. He resolved to invent a switchboard system that would eliminate the operators. The system could serve ninety-nine telephones and was based on a sort of windshield wiper in the central office that automatically moved around to touch the contacts of the number being called.

Automation comes slowly

The first large scale deployment of semiautomatic equipment occurred in Newark, New Jersey in 1914; and the first fully automatic system was installed in Omaha in 1921. However, automatic switching was limited to local calls for the first half of the 20th century; and direct distance dialing would not be introduced until 1951.  

The first transcontinental call took place in January 1915 when Bell in New York called Watson in San Francisco. The call took 23 minutes to get through. Intercontinental service began in 1927 between New York and London with callers being charged $75 for the first three minutes.

Independent companies serve rural America

In rural America, independent telephone companies began springing up as early as 1890. After a manual was published explaining how farmers could develop their own telephone systems on a mutual or cooperative basis, many such systems emerged in the succeeding years. By 1912, more than 3,200 rural telephone systems were serving rural America.

After Bell’s original patents expired, the industry entered a period of great competition, and by 1907, independent telephone companies had almost as many phones in service as the Bell system — nearly three million each.

In 1910, writer Herbert Casson wrote, "Who could have foreseen what the telephone bells have done to ring out the old ways and to ring in the new; to ring out delay and isolation and to ring in the efficiency and friendliness of a truly united people?" The invention that was at first considered a toy had indeed changed the world.