Who invented the telephone?

Who invented the telephone?

In the 1870s, two inventors Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically. Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other. Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell won.

The telegraph and telephone are both wire-based electrical systems, and Alexander Graham Bell’s success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph. When Bell began experimenting with electrical signals, the telegraph had been an established means of communication for some 30 years. Although a highly successful system, the telegraph, with its dot-and-dash Morse code was basically limited to receiving and sending one message at a time. Bell’s extensive knowledge of the nature of sound and his understanding of music enabled him to conjecture the possibility of transmitting multiple messages over the same wire at the same time. Bell’s ‘harmonic telegraph’ was based on the principle that several notes could be sent simultaneously along the same wire if the notes or signals differed in pitch.

By October 1874, Bell informed Boston attorney Gardiner Green Hubbard, about the possibility of a multiple telegraph. Hubbard, who resented the absolute control then exerted by the Western Union Telegraph Company, instantly saw the potential for breaking such a monopoly and gave Bell the financial backing he needed. Bell proceeded with his work on the multiple telegraphs, but he did not tell Hubbard that he and Thomas Watson, a young electrician whose servicees he had enlisted were also exploring an idea that had occurred to him that summer-that of developing a device that would transit speech electrically.