-
Before the invention of telephones, mechanical acoustic devices existed for transmitting speech and music over a distance greater than that of normal direct speech.
-
Antonio Meucci is credited for inventing the first basic phone.
-
Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854.
-
Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device in 1876.
-
President Rutherford B. Hayes to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 on viewing the telephone for the first time: “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”
-
In 1877-78, the first telephone line was constructed, the first switchboard was created and the first telephone exchange was in operation. Three years later, almost 49,000 telephones were in use
-
The American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) was created.
-
By 1900 there were nearly 600,000 phones in Bell's telephone system; that number shot up to 2.2 million phones by 1905, and 5.8 million by 1910. In 1915 the transcontinental telephone line began operating.
