In these days of near-universal mobile telecoms, you could be forgiven for taking telephone communications for granted, and with mobile service providers offering their subscribers hundreds of minutes of free calls every month with their monthly payment plans, talk has never been so cheap. No one knows who really invented the telephone, as several different inventors have claimed it as their own, but it was the patents set down by Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell that were to prove decisive commercially. Although people had been talking through pipes to each other for centuries, the first telephone to be capable of working over any great distance was created by a man named Robert Hooke way back in 1667. His contraption used mechanical vibrations to convey sounds over an extended , taut, piece of wire. That was about it for vocal telecommunications for the next 180 years, but the invention of the electrical telegraphy machine in the early 19th century pioneered long distance electrical telecommunications, and in Eighteen Forty Four an inventor named Innocenzo Manzetti first explored the idea of a ‘speaking telegraph’. Ten years later the French scientist Charles Bourseul wrote an article expositing the principles of the electric telephone. In eighteen fifty four, an Italian fellow named Antonio Meucci demonstrated an electro-mechanical voice-operated contraption in New York, which is considered by many to have been the first electrical telephone. He was not a wealthy man, however, and as such could not afford to patent his invention, which virtually forced him to keep the details of his amazing invention a secret, and as a consequence we shall never know if he did indeed have a working telephone at this time. In 1861, the Austrian known as Philipp Reis planned, constructed and successfully demonstrated what is thought the first speech-transmitting electrical telephone, inspired by Bourseul’s article 15 years previously. The Reis telephone was an amazing achievement, but due to the limitations of the microphone and speaker technology it employed, it could not transmit the fast, transient sounds of consonants as well as it did the slower sounds produced by vowels, and as such was of limited practical use. A translation of his work somehow got to Alexander Graham Bell in the US, who improved upon the design, improving the loudspeaker, and implementing a multiplexing system which allowed many phones to use the same line. He got his a patent approved in 1875, just hours before his rival Elisha Gray, of Western Electric, in the race to patent the first truly usable electrical telephone. However, it was not until Thomas Edison applied his advances in microphone technology to Bell’s existing telephone designs in 1877 that clear speech transmission over copper wires became a workable reality. However, the raft of litigation that followed between Bell and Gray over the patent issue ensured that this telephone was not commercially available until the 1890s.
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In these days of near-universal mobile telecoms, you could be forgiven for taking telephone communications for granted, and with mobile service providers offering their subscribers hundreds of minutes of free calls every month with their monthly payment plans, talk has never been so cheap. No one knows who really invented the telephone, as several different inventors have claimed it as their own, but it was the patents set down by Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell that were to prove ...
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