History


Bell was the first place in New York call Chicago in 1892.

Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed, and new controversies over the issue have arisen from time to time. As with other influential inventions such as radio, television, the light bulb and the computer there were several inventors who did pioneering experimental work on voice transmission over a wire and improved on each other's ideas . Innocenzo Manzetti, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, among others, have all been credited with pioneer work on the telephone. An indisputable fact is that Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in March 1876. The first patent by Bell was the master patent of the telephone, from which all other patents for electric telephone devices and features flowed.

The early history of the telephone became and remains a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified by the large number of lawsuits that hoped to resolve the patent claims of many individuals and commercial competitors. Patents of Edison and Bell, however, were victorious and commercial forensic decisive.

A Hungarian engineer, Tivadar Puskás, quickly invented the telephone switchboard in 1876, which allowed the formation of telephone exchanges, and eventually networks.

The phone comes from the Greek word τῆλε, TV, "far" and φωνή, phone, "voice".