Question: who invented the phone

Sinead Cullen answered on 16 Nov 2013:

Hi Paddy,

Well Alexander Graham Bell gets credited for the invention of the telephone, but there was a lot of work done by other individuals before Bell and this lead to a lot of lawsuits and controversy in the area.

The first works can date back to the classic is the tin can telephone which was a children’s toy made by connecting the two ends of a string to the bottoms of two metal cans or paper cups. And you can still make these to have lots of fun with at home, but use the paper cups as these are safer.

1833 when Carl Friedrich Gauß and Wilhelm Eduard Weber invented an electromagnetic device for the transmission of telegraphic signals in Göttingen, Germany, helping to create the fundamental basis for the technology that was later used in similar telecommunication devices. Gauß and Weber’s invention is the world’s first electromagnetic telegraph.

So the invention of the electromagnetic telegraph lead to the development of the telephone. In 1837, an American guy called Charles Grafton Page passed an electric current through a coil of wire which was placed between the poles of a horseshoe magnet. He saw that connecting and disconnecting the current caused a ringing sound in the magnet. He called this effect “galvanic music”. Pretty cool!

Innocenzo Manzetti was an Italian guy did some work on the telephone too and in 1865 in Paris, a journalist wrote this about his work,
“Manzetti transmits directly the word by means of the ordinary telegraphic wire, with an apparatus simpler than the one which is now used for dispatches. Now, two merchants will be able to discuss their business instantly from London to Calcutta, announce each other speculations, propose them, conclude them. Many experiments have been made already. They were successful enough to establish the practical possibility of this discovery. Music can already be perfectly transmitted; as for the words, the sonorous ones are heard distinctly.”

Charles Bourseul was a Belgian Engineer who proposed the make and break telephone in 1854 but did not build it.

Antonio Meucci who was also Italian, invented a voice communicating device in 1854 and called it a telettrofono. Meucci filed something like a patent (which is a document which says you own the invention). What Meucci filled was called a caveat and you had to pay 10 dollars to the US Patent Filing Office to renew this after one year but he did not do this.
If Meucci did do this the Patent for the telephone could not have been given to Alexander Graham Bell.

Elisha Gray from Chicago did a lot of work on the on the invention of the telephone too, Gray used several vibrating steel reeds tuned to different frequencies interrupted the current, which at the other end of the line passed through electromagnets and vibrated matching tuned steel reeds near the electromagnet poles. Gray’s this was patented as the ‘harmonic telegraph’

On the same day in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent and he was the first to obtain a patent, in 1876, for an “apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically” and the first words he spoke were “Watson, come here! I want to see you!”.

Ok so that is a really really long answer but some nice Saturday morning reading for you.

Hope it helps 🙂