The history of the telephone

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Bell had always been interested in the science of sound because both his wife and mother were deaf. Eventually, all his experiments with sounds led to him to want to send voice signals down a telegraph wire. Bell got funding to hire an assistant, Thomas Watson, to help create the telephone. On August 10, 1876, Bell and Watson made the first long-distance, around six miles, telephone.

Bell didn’t make the first transcontinental telephone call until January 15, 1915. He called Thomas Watson from New York while he was in San Francisco on the Candlestick telephone. By the twenties, telephones had become very common in homes and the workplace. According to www.elon.edu, there were 600,000 thousand in Bell’s telephone system in the early 1900s, by 1905 it had shot up to 2.2 million, and in the 1920s there were 5.8 million.

In the thirties, Bell started working on a new type of phone, something far different than the candlestick phones. These were known as the model telephones and were pretty popular in the 30s and 40s. Rotary phones became popular in the 50s, although they were actually developed in 1896 by John and Charles Erickson and their partner A.E. Keith. They weren’t frequently used until 1919 and were popular from the 50s through the mid-70s.

The eighties beheld the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, most commonly called a box phone. It was launched in 1983. Created by Martin Cooper, it originally sold for around $3,995 when it reached the market. This phone was the beginning of something big.

1999 was the year the Nokia phones came out and dominated the wireless market. Nokia was the best-selling mobile brand in the world. The next phone that started a craze was the Sharp J-phone which started in Japan and was the world’s first camera phone made by Sharp Corporation in November 2000s.

Next, there was the Blackberry with a color screen in 2003.

The next biggest phone was in 2007 with the iPhone touch, the phone that changed society forever. The phone was considered a big improvement from former phones. Its operating system allowed users to browse full webpages, triangulate positioning with Google maps and easily download apps.

Comparing the first phones to the current phones shows amazing leaps in technology. Phones today give everyone access to FaceTime, a camera, games and other useful apps with just a click of a button. If people in the 1870s saw what phones looked like nearly 150 years later, they would be amazed.  Imagine what it will be like in another 150 years.