Telecommunications

The major events of telecommunication 's history

Telephone names from the Greek word tele , meaning from afar , and phone , meaning voice or voiced sound . Generally , a telephone is any device which conveys sound over a distance

Telephone history begins at the start of human history . Man has always wanted to communicate from afar . People have used smoke signals mirrors , jungle drums , carrier pigeons and semaphores to get a message from one point to another . But a phone was something new . Some say Francis Bacon predicted the telephone in 1627 however , his book

New Utopia only described a long speaking tube . A real telephone could not be invented until the electrical age began . And even then it didn 't seem desirable . The electrical principles needed to build a telephone were known in 1831 but it wasn 't until 1854 that Bourseul suggested transmitting speech electrically . And it wasn 't until 22 years later in 1876 that the idea became a reality . But before then , a telephone might have been impossible to form in one 's consciousness

In the 1870s , two inventors HYPERLINK "http /inventors .about .com /library /inventors /blelishagray .htm " Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically . Thomas Watson fashioned the device itself a crude thing made of a wooden stand , a funnel , a cup of acid and some copper wire

Bell d his application just hours before his competitor , Elisha Gray , d notice to soon patent a telephone himself . What 's more though neither man had actually built a working telephone , Bell made his telephone operate three weeks later using ideas outlined in Gray 's Notice of Invention , methods Bell did not propose in his own patent

United States Patent No . 174 ,465 , issued to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 , became recognized as the "most valuable patent " Yet early efforts to popularize the telephone were met with disappointment . Though people paid to hear Bell lecture on "the miracle discovery of the age , for a long time they seemed unaware of its possibilities

The HYPERLINK "http /inventors .about .com /library /inventors /bltelegraph .htm telegraph and telephone are both wire-based electrical systems , and Alexander Graham Bell 's success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph

In July of 1877 , the Bell Telephone Company was formed by Gardiner Hubbard . By the end of 1877 there were three thousand telephones in service

In 1906 Lee de Forest invented the electron tube . Its amplifying properties pointed the way to national phone service . Long distance service at that time was still limited . Loading coils helped to a point but no further

As the new century dawned , the Bell Company had 800 ,000 phones in service compared to 600 ,000 in independent territories . In 1921 the Bell System introduced the first commercial panel switch , an odd beast if there ever was one . When crossbar switching came on the scene in 1938 panel switches were removed where possible , although some remained working...