Ahoy hoy?

The telephone is a pretty standard bit of technology and almost everybody has a landline or a mobile.

I don’t really care about mobiles that much and they are all just becoming little computers anyway so I want to focus on land line phones.

The derivation of the word is simple and derives from Greek; “Tele” means ‘far’ and “Phone” means ‘voice’. That’s why we call it the far voice machine.

It turns out that a lot of different people think they invented the Telephone but these are the main guys:

Whoever actually invented it or came up with the idea or whatever, it was Bell and Edison that had the successful patents for commercialisation and development of the technology so they came out on top.

Bell was granted the patent on March 7^th 1876 and transmitted the first telephone call that same year just 3 days later. The message was, “Mr Watson, come here! I want to see you.”

Early development

There were other ways of transmitting and receiving messages at a distance which would develop to become the telephone.

I guess the most obvious first step of the telephone is the classic 2 cups and a string phone that everyone makes at some point in their lives.

The string gets stretched tight so that it can carry the vibrations across the line so that when one person speaks into one end then the other person can hear a rubbish muffled version of whatever the first guy was saying.

The next big step in the development was the electric telegraph.

It was originally invented in 1804 in the Catalan Countries next door to France by Francisco Salva i Campillo.

Later in 1837 there was a patent granted on another electrical telegraph in the US by Mr. Samuel Morse. He also invented the Morse code with his assistant and sent the first telegram in 1838 in the US.

He later worked on trying to improve telegraphs communication with other scientists including Alexander Graham Bell and these attempts at development eventually ended in the invention of the telephone.