Long gone are the days when having a mobile phone was perceived as something outlandish and incredibly expensive. Today, a telephone is a must-have item for almost any person. With it you can make calls, write letters, listen to music and much more. What was it like before? Who invented the telephone?
Who invented the first telephone
It's no secret that the telephone was invented by the Americans. But before the invention of telegraphs and telephones, there were other ways to transmit information over long distances. To signal attacks or other significant events, our ancestors used smoke, fire, whistles, drumming and gunshots. The disadvantage of such signal transmission was the distortion of sounds and the need to create intermediate points. The invention of the telephone we are accustomed to was preceded by the discovery of the telegraph.
Who invented the first telephone in 1876? It was Alexander Bell. He and his assistant worked on the creation of a “talking telegraph”. The device worked using an electric line, but transmission was carried out no further than half a kilometer. The call was made through the handset using a whistle. Bell's telegraph was not originally equipped with a bell. Later his colleague Watson added this important detail. The presence of a bell distinguished the Bell apparatus from all previously invented models. The phone requires DC current to operate.
The patent issued to Bell was one of the most sought after for a long time, but success did not come to the scientist immediately. At first he demonstrated his invention at exhibitions. The phone was written about in the newspapers. But Bell never received any income from the device. That was until his fateful trip to England. In the summer of 1877, Bell and his girlfriend went on a trip, not forgetting to take the apparatus. It was there that the demonstration of the device aroused the approval of the public, and word of the miracle machine reached the royal palace. Alexandra Bella invited Her Majesty to her place. Here he once again showed the capabilities of the device. The Queen was delighted.
Following the success of the electric telephone in England, Western Union created the American Speaker Telephone Company, disregarding Bell's patent rights. Bell's like-minded people opened the New England Telephone Company. The company leaders spent a long time sorting things out, until in 1879 the joint company Bell Company was born. Interestingly, throughout his life Bell flatly refused to install a telephone at home, saying that the device could turn his life into hell.
Who invented the first dial telephone
American citizen Almon Brown Strowger invented the first dial telephone. A patent for this invention was issued in 1891. Mr. Strowger owned a funeral home, but a competitor's wife was a telephone operator. She forwarded all calls asking to be connected to the funeral home to her husband. Strowger's business was on the verge of collapse. It was then that he thought about creating a device with a direct connection.
Strowger's automatic telephone exchange began operation in 1892. The telephone model did not have holes for dialing numbers; they were replaced by teeth located in a circle. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Strowger's Automatic Electric Company produced a landline telephone with the familiar finger holes. The last improved model was released in 1907. Then nothing was heard about the development of the company until it was bought out by Bell Systems. It is curious that Bell Systems itself released a rotary-dial telephone only in 1919.
Who invented the mobile phone
Motorola employee Martin Cooper invented the first mobile phone. He made his first remote conversation in 1973, while walking down the street. One can only imagine people's reaction to this invention. The very first phone in the world was not so perfect: the battery charge lasted for 20 minutes, and the dimensions were not so compact.
Although the Americans’ right to primacy can be challenged, because back in 1957, Soviet radio engineer Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich invented the first model weighing 3 kg. But who in the Soviet Union thought about patents? The first telephone went on sale in America on June 13, 1983. In the first year alone, more than 300 thousand Americans purchased it.
Today Cell phones Available for every taste and color. Manufacturers boldly keep up with the times to satisfy any needs. I wonder what the phone of the future will look like?
An invisible and omnipotent electric current carried news of military victories and defeats, family joys and coups d'etat, livestock exhibitions and sometimes... scientific discoveries to all corners of the Earth. Newspapers quickly printed incoming messages, and for the first time people began to feel that our planet was not as big as they had previously thought.
But sometimes messages in newspapers and magazines appeared much later than they were received. One day this was due to the fact that the news being transmitted... was difficult to believe.
On October 6, 1877, a large article with detailed drawings appeared in the famous popular science magazine Scientific American. It talked about a new invention - the telephone, which was made by a young teacher at the Boston School for the Deaf and Dumb. Alexander Bell.
Bell's phone was demonstrated in the summer of 1876 at the Exhibition in honor of the centenary of the founding of the United States of America in Philadelphia, in January 1877 at a meeting of the Philosophical Society in Washington, before the public and journalists in Salem, Boston, and New York. The invention was so unusual that without special thorough testing, such reputable publications as the Scientific American did not want to write about it...
In his work, Alexander Graham Bell, of course, benefited from a good knowledge of not only electrical engineering, but also acoustics - the science that studies the properties of sound. No wonder he, like his grandfather and father, was an expert in oratory and a teacher who taught correct speech!
Sound propagates due to periodic compression and rarefaction of air. A small horn can collect sound and direct it to a sensing element, such as a membrane. Bell made very light and thin membrane plates - their vibrations under the influence of the sounds of human speech were noticeable even to the naked eye.
The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Bell, demonstrates to the audience a miracle: the transmission of the human voice over long distances.
In the end, he settled on a membrane made of thin iron foil, which he placed inside an electromagnet. When the membrane vibrated in time with human speech, signals were sent through electrical wires from the electromagnet to the receiving station alternating current. After all, the field inside the magnet changed in exact accordance with the movements of the membrane!
At the receiving station, the opposite transformation took place: under the influence of alternating pulses of electric current, oscillations of the iron membrane, also placed in an electromagnet, arose. Vibrations of the membrane of the receiving tube were transmitted to the surrounding air. It contained the sounds of a person’s voice speaking in front of a transmitting membrane installed in another room or... in another city - this depended only on the length and thickness of the electrical wires!
Inquisitive newspaper correspondents surrounded Bell and his young assistant Watson in a dense crowd during all public demonstrations of the telephone. Bell and Watson were in different cities at the time. All words spoken by them were accurately recorded. Then, when correspondents gathered in one city, the words were meticulously compared. Even the most incredulous were convinced that there could be no question of deception in these experiments... And only then did an article appear in the Scientific American.
Alexander Bell received a patent for the invention of the telephone and founded a company that began manufacturing and selling telephones to everyone. Projects have been developed to create central telephone dispatch centers in large cities, where signals from individual subscribers are received. In the early years, before the creation of automatic number connection systems at the central control room, this tedious work had to be done by hundreds of girls with melodious voices...
It's hard to imagine our life without a phone!
The telephone was so convenient, necessary for people and... a profitable invention that Bell’s copyright was tried many times by both individual inventors and entire corporations. Once, several senators, former governors and even... the US Attorney General joined the “fight” with Bell. They founded their own private telephone company and tried to take away Bell's rights to the invention. The famous American writer and scientist Mitchell Wilson writes: “This pirate attempt to rob Bell was quite consistent with the morals that reigned in business in those days, and there was only one thing unusual about it: it failed.”
The telephone, like many other inventions of the 19th and early 20th centuries: photography, phonograph, gramophone, cinema, successfully developing and improving, has survived to this day.
Now, for example, it is very difficult for us to imagine life without a telephone! And the restless inventors of the last quarter of the 19th century, not having time to get used to the telephone, continued their pursuit of discoveries. They already wanted to learn how to transfer the sounds of the human voice without wires.
After all, you can’t connect two ships with wires. It is difficult to release into the air on a wire-rope an airplane that has just been created thanks to creative quests and an indomitable thirst for something new, which inspired inventors in many countries around the world!
By the way, Alexander Bell himself also always dreamed of stopping the fight for patents and starting creating new aircraft designs...
But how to replace electrical wires? The inventors did not know this. After all, the sound of a human voice, even the loudest one, quickly fades in the air, as we well know from our own experience, trying in vain to call someone from a distance of 200-300 meters...
An invention such as the telephone appeared thanks to the electric telegraph, which became a major breakthrough in the history of communications. Using the telegraph, it became possible to quickly transmit messages between different parts of the world - now there was no need to wait several weeks or months for this. However, the telegraph was not perfect, because it could be used to transmit written messages, so many at that time dreamed of such a perfect device that would allow human speech to be transmitted over long distances.
"Telephone" background
The history of the telephone, like the history of any invention, began with an idea proposed by the French mechanical engineer and part-time vice-speaker of the capital's telegraph, Charles Bourcel. The principle of operation of his telephone, by the way, it was Boursel who first used this word; the engineer described it in his dissertation in 1854, but never put it into practice.
Then in 1860 in the United States, Italian immigrant Antonio Melucci developed a device capable of transmitting sounds through wires. He called his invention “Telectrophon”, patenting it in 1871.
Who invented the first telephone?
You can search for a long time for answers to the questions “When did the first telephone appear?” And " Who invented the first telephone ?. The true answers, like the answer to the question of the invention of the first car, do not lie on the surface.
At that time, many scientists and inventors were working on experiments on signal transmission over a distance. One of them was the American physicist Page, who in 1837 came up with a design consisting of a tuning fork, an electromagnet and galvanic elements. With their help, he was able to transmit sound vibrations, thereby proving the possibility of transmitting sound over distances.
Prototype of the first telephone
To transmit sound waves, more advanced devices for receiving and transmitting electrical signals were needed. And the “telephone baton” passed to the German physicist and inventor Reis, who in 1861 invented a device capable of transmitting music and human speech at a distance. Race's apparatus was a box with a hole, tightly sealed with a thin membrane membrane, through which sound “came.” During vibrations, the membrane came into contact with the platinum needle, closing or opening the electrical circuit and transmitting the signal to the receiver. The receiving device contained an iron spoke, which, when receiving a signal, oscillated and emitted sound waves similar to those coming from the transmitter. Although Race's device made it possible to partially transmit human speech and complex musical phrases, the output had very poor sound quality due to side noise from closing and opening the circuit. In addition, the vibrations of the needle also did not modulate the voice very well. Race called his invention “telephone.”
Despite such shortcomings of the device, the answer to the question “ Who invented the first telephone ? Race may become the inventor. After all, it was his invention that became the very first telephone in the world.
Bell's first phone
To achieve sound purity - its clarity and intelligibility, it was necessary to solve the problem of sound transmission and create a device that would transmit sound waves smoothly, and not abruptly. The inventor Alexander Bell was able to solve this problem. It was he who, in 1875, was able to develop a more advanced device with high-quality sound transmission. In 1876, Bell received a patent for his invention, which he called the “talking telegraph.” The Bell apparatus was a tube that transmitted and received the sounds of human speech. Bell's telephone was the first telephone with high-quality sound. The disadvantage of this device was the absence of a bell, which was invented a little later by his partner, another inventor, T. Watson. Bell's apparatus could transmit human speech over a distance of up to 500 meters.
Bell can also be remembered if you are asked the question " Who invented the first telephone? “, after all, it was he who was officially considered the inventor of the first telephone for a long time. However, in 2002, the American Congress, by its resolution, transferred this “title” to an American of Italian origin, Antonio Melucci.
The right of primacy to invent the telephone, simultaneously with Bell, was challenged by another American inventor from Chicago, Elisha Gray, who also applied for a patent for a similar device. However, Gray later abandoned his idea, which in the future caused numerous disputes about who first invented the telephone.
Then the history of the phone only gained momentum. So, in 1877, a key was invented, which was later replaced by a button that closes an electrical circuit. A factory in Russia began producing telephones with two handsets - for receiving and transmitting sounds. At the end of the 70s. In the 19th century, Thomas Edison developed a carbon microphone design that still works today.
The appearance of the first telephone marked the beginning of the successful development of a new means of communication - the telephone. But the development of the invention, which allows transmitting the human voice over long distances, did not end there, and innovators began to look for new ways to transmit sound without using wires. Thanks to their inventions, today we use various types of communications - mobile, satellite and digital.
On February 14, 1876, Scottish-American Alexander Graham Bell filed an application with the US Patent Office for a device he invented, which he called a telephone. Just two hours later, another American named Gray made a similar request.
This still happens to inventors today, although very rarely. Bell's luck also lay in the fact that an accident helped him make an outstanding invention. However, to a much greater extent, the telephone owes its appearance to the enormous work, perseverance and knowledge of this person.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh on March 3, 1847, into a family of philologists. At the age of 14, he moved to London to live with his grandfather, under whose guidance he studied literature and public speaking. And three years later he began an independent life, teaching music and public speaking at Weston House Academy. In the spring of 1871, the family moved to Boston, where Bell taught a school for the deaf and dumb using the "system of visible speech" invented by his grandfather.
At that time, the Western Union Company was looking for a way to simultaneously transmit several telegrams over one pair of wires in order to eliminate the need to lay additional telegraph lines. The company announced a large cash prize for the inventor who proposes a similar method.
Bell began to work on this problem, using his knowledge of the laws of acoustics. Bell was going to transmit seven telegrams simultaneously, according to the number of musical notes - a tribute to the music he had loved since childhood. Bell was helped in his work on the “musical telegraph” by a young Boston resident, Thomas Watson. Watson admired Bell.
“Once, when I was working, a tall, slender, agile man with a pale face, black sideburns and a high sloping forehead quickly approached my workbench, holding in his hands some part of the apparatus that was not made the way he wanted. “He was the first educated person with whom I became closely acquainted, and much about him delighted me.”
Thomas Watson
about Graham Bell
And not only him. Bell's horizons were unusually broad, which was recognized by many of his contemporaries. His versatile education was combined with a lively imagination, and this allowed him to easily combine in his experiments such diverse areas of science and art - acoustics, music, electrical engineering and mechanics.
Since Bell was not an electrician, he consulted another famous Bostonian, the scientist D. Henry, after whom the unit of inductance is named. After examining the first sample of the telegraph at Bell Laboratory, Henry exclaimed: “Under any pretext, do not quit what you started!” Without abandoning work on the “musical telegraph,” Bell at the same time began to build a certain apparatus, through which he hoped to make the sounds of speech visible to the deaf and dumb immediately and directly, without any written notation. To do this, he worked for almost a year at the Massachusetts Otolaryngological Hospital, conducting various experiments to study human hearing.
The main part of the apparatus was to be a membrane; a needle attached to the latter recorded curves corresponding to various sounds, syllables and words on the surface of a rotating drum. Reflecting on the action of the membrane, Bell came up with the idea of another device, with the help of which, as he wrote, “the transmission of various sounds will become possible, if only it is possible to cause fluctuations in the intensity of the electric current corresponding to the fluctuations in the density of the air which the given sound produces.” Bell gave this still non-existent device the sonorous name “telephone”. Thus, work on the particular task of helping the deaf and dumb led to the idea of the possibility of creating a device that turned out to be necessary for all of humanity and, undoubtedly, influenced the further course of history.
While working on the “musical telegraph,” Bell and Watson worked in separate rooms where the transmitting and receiving apparatus were installed. Tuning forks were steel plates of different lengths, rigidly fixed at one end and closing an electrical circuit at the other.
One day, Watson had to free the end of a record that was stuck in the contact gap and in the process touched other records. Naturally, they rattled. Writer Mitchell Wilson describes subsequent events as follows: “Although the experimenters believed that the line was not working, Bell’s keen hearing caught a faint rattling sound in the receiving device. He immediately guessed what had happened and rushed headlong into Watson’s room. “What were you doing now? - he shouted. “Don’t change anything!” Watson began to explain what was the matter, but Bell excitedly interrupted him, saying that they had now discovered what they had been looking for all along.” The stuck plate acted like a primitive diaphragm. In all of Bell and Watson's previous experiments, the free end simply closed and opened an electrical circuit. Now the sound vibrations of the plate induced electromagnetic vibrations in a magnet located next to the plate. This was the difference between the telephone and all other pre-existing telegraph devices.
For the telephone to operate, a continuous electric current is required, the strength of which would vary in exact accordance with the vibrations of sound waves in the air. The invention of the telephone coincided with the peak of the electric telegraph and was completely unexpected. At that time, in the United States, the Morse-based Magnetic Telegraph Company was completing construction of a line from Mississippi to the East Coast. In Russia, Boris Jacobi created more and more advanced devices, surpassing all competitors in reliability and transmission speed. The telegraph was so consistent with the needs of its era that other means of electrical communication were, it seems, not needed at all.
The world's first telephone, assembled by Watson, had a sound membrane made of leather. Its center was connected to the moving armature of the electromagnet. Sound vibrations were amplified by the horn, concentrating on a membrane fixed in its smallest section.
Bell's breadth of vision played no less a role in the invention of the telephone than his intuition. Knowledge of acoustics and electrical engineering, combined with experience as an experimenter, led a teacher at a school for deaf children to an invention that allowed millions of people to hear each other across continents and oceans.
Meanwhile, telephony as the principle of transmitting information by voice over long distances was known even before the new era. The Persian king Cyrus (VI century BC) employed 30,000 people called “royal ears” for this purpose. Positioned on the tops of hills and watchtowers within earshot of each other, they conveyed messages intended for the king and his orders. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC) testifies that in one day, news via such a telephone was transmitted over a thirty-day journey. Julius Caesar mentions that the Gauls also had a similar communication system. It even indicates the speed of message transmission - 100 kilometers per hour.
In 1876, Bell demonstrated his apparatus at the Philadelphia World's Fair. The word telephone was heard for the first time within the walls of the exhibition pavilion - this is how the inventor recommended his “talking telegraph”. To the amazement of the jury, the monologue of the Prince of Denmark “To be or not to be?” was heard from the mouthpiece of this contraption, performed at the same time, but in a different room, by the inventor himself, Mr. Bell.
History answered this question with an unquestioning “to be.” Bell's invention became a sensation at the Philadelphia Exhibition. And this is despite the fact that the first telephone worked with monstrous sound distortions, it was possible to talk with its help no further than 250 meters, because it operated without batteries, by the power of electromagnetic induction alone, its receiving and transmitting devices were the same primitive.
Having organized the Bell Telephone Society, the inventor began hard work to improve his brainchild, and a year later he patented a new membrane and fittings for the telephone. Then he used a Yuz carbon microphone and battery power to increase the transmission distance. In this form, the telephone successfully existed for more than a hundred years.
Many other inventors began improving telephone devices, and by 1900, more than 3 thousand patents had been issued in this area. Of these, we can note the microphone designed by the Russian engineer M. Makhalsky (1878), as well as the first automatic station for 10,000 numbers by S. M. Apostolov (1894). But then, after the Philadelphia Exhibition, the history of the telephone was just beginning. Ahead was a fierce struggle with competitors. Bell also faced competition with another famous inventor, Thomas Edison.
Bell's patent turned out to be one of the most lucrative patents ever issued in the United States, and over the next decades he was targeted by nearly every major electrical and telegraph company in America. However, its commercial significance was not immediately understood by contemporaries. Almost immediately after receiving the patent, Bell offered to buy it to Western Union for $100,000, hoping that the proceeds would enable him to pay off his debts. But his proposal did not meet with a response.
Bell demonstrated his phone to audiences in Salem, Boston, and New York. The first broadcasts consisted mainly of playing musical instruments and singing popular arias. Newspapers wrote about the inventor with respect, but his activities brought almost no money.
On June 11, 1877, Bell and Mabel Hubbard were married at the home of the bride's parents, and the young couple sailed to England. This trip played a huge role in the history of the telephone. In England, Bell successfully continued demonstrations that gathered a large number of public. Finally, a "delightful telephone performance" was given to the Queen herself and her family. The titled persons sang, recited and talked to each other over the wires, interrupting themselves with questions about whether they could be heard well. The queen was pleased.
Newspapers made so much noise about the success of the telephone in England that Western Union had to change its attitude towards the invention. The company's president, Orton, reasoned that if the electric telephone was invented by some teacher for the deaf, then specialists like Edison and Gray would be able to create a better device. And at the beginning of 1879, Western Union created the American Speaker Telephone Company, which began producing telephones, ignoring Bell's patent rights.
Bell's supporters took out loans, created the New England Telephone Company in response, and rushed into battle. The result of the struggle, however, was the creation at the end of 1879 of the united Bell Company. In December of that year, the stock price rose to $995. Bell became an extremely wealthy man. Wealth was accompanied by fame and worldwide fame. France awarded him the Volta Prize, established by Napoleon, in the amount of 50 thousand francs (before Bell, this prize was awarded only once), and made him a Knight of the Legion of Honor. In 1885 he took American citizenship.
In one of his letters to his companions, Bell, for the first time in history and at the same time in great detail, outlined a plan for creating a telephone network, based on a central switch. In the letter, he insisted that for advertising purposes it would be desirable to install telephone sets free of charge in the central stores of the city.
On the rainy morning of August 4, 1922, all telephones in the United States and Canada were turned off for a minute. America buried Alexander Graham Bell. 13 million telephone sets of all kinds and designs fell silent in honor of the great inventor.
Ordinary Story: Telephone