Who invented the telephone is one of those questions that’s not easy to answer. There were actually lots of people working on the problem. Alexander Graham Bell may have been the first to actually get one to work, or he might not have been. What is clear is that he was the first guy to be awarded a patent, and that made all the difference.

The first telephones were simple things, and would only work between two points, just like those cans on a string you played with as a kid. You needed a telephone at both ends of your private line, and you let someone on the other end know you wanted to talk to them by whistling loudly. Later on, bells were added. However, if you didn’t have ready electricity to run your bells, you had to charge up the bells on the other side with a hand crank on your end. The idea of a network, linking many points through a central hub, wasn’t new with the telephone.The Western Union Telegraph Company had been using networks before the telephone came along.

However, it took time before the telephone moved from being a novelty to an expected and useful tool in every home. It was the simplicity of the device that led to its wide-spread adoption. To operate a telegraph, you had to know Morse code. While the code was sent across the wire, someone at the other end had to write out the dots and dashes before laboriously translating the signals into letters. By comparison, anyone who could hear and speak could use a telephone with the most minimal training.

As the telephone network was expanded, more and more folks could be added to the system. Early phones had batteries in them to power their signals, and these needed periodic replacement.Soon, however, the electric power grid was expanded and the phone network itself began to carry the current necessary to power the telephones. A compact telephone with dial, bells, circuits, and a single hand-held combination of receiver and speaker was released in the 1930s. This device would remain pretty much unchanged until the development of touch-tone phones thirty years later.

It wouldn’t be until 1983 that true hand-held mobile phones would reach the market. The first phones were big, clunky things, requiring the energy of a vehicle to power them, or a
large battery pack to be carried along with the phone. As both electronics and batteries got smaller, so did both the phones and their cost. Today’s phones are easily in the range of most consumers, fit in your pocket, and look more like a calculator from 1983 than an actual telephone of that era.

But phones are still changing as technology marches on. The latest revolution comes in the form of voice over IP, or VOIP as it’s commonly abbreviated. Transmitting voice over packet-switched networks allows you to make phone calls from anywhere you can get a ‘net connection and makes it easy to combine the traditional conversation of the telephone with other information technologies, like databases and video. Using VoIP with modern cellular mobile service allows people to take their digital lives with them, wherever they choose to go.

Photo Credits: Jan Joris Vereijken, smith, Paul Keleher, Alexander O Neill