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Most people know Alexander Graham
Bell invented the telephone, but there was much more to it, at
that time, and since:
1667: Robert Hooke creates an
acoustic string telephone that conveys sounds over a taut
extended wire by mechanical vibrations.
1844: Innocenzo Manzetti first suggests the idea of an
electric “speaking telegraph,” or telephone.
1849: Antonio Meucci demonstrates a communicating device to
individuals in Havana.
1854: Meucci demonstrates an
electric voice-operated device in New York, but it is not
clear what kind of device he demonstrated.
1861: Johann Philipp Reis manages to transfer voice
electrically over a distance of 340 feet with his Reis
telephone. Reis uses his telephone to transmit his phrase "The
horse does not eat cucumber salad."
1864: in an attempt to give his musical automaton a voice, Innocenzo Manzetti invents the 'speaking telegraph.' He shows
no interest in patenting his device, but it is reported in
newspapers.
1871: Meucci files a patent caveat (a statement of intention
to file a patent application) for a Sound Telegraph, but it
does not describe an electromagnetic telephone.
1872: Elisha Gray founds the Western Electric Manufacturing
Company.
1872: Professor Vanderwyde demonstrated Reis' telephone in
New York.
July 1873: Thomas Edison notes variable resistance in carbon
grains due to pressure, builds a rheostat based on the
principle but abandons it because of its sensitivity to
vibration.
May 1874: Gray invents electromagnet device for transmitting
musical tones. Some of his receivers use a metallic diaphragm.
July 1874: Alexander Graham Bell first conceives the
theoretical concept for the telephone while vacationing at his
parents' farm near Brantford, Canada. Alexander Melville Bell
records notes of his son's conversation in his personal
journal.
December 29, 1874: Gray demonstrates his musical tones device
and transmitted "familiar melodies through telegraph wire" at
the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois.
May 4, 1875: Bell conceives of using variable resistance in a
wire conducting electric current to create variable amplitude
of the current.
June 2, 1875: Bell transmits the sound of a plucked steel reed
using electromagnet instruments.
July 1, 1875: Bell uses a bi-directional "gallows" telephone
that was able to transmit "indistinct but voice-like sounds"
but not clear speech. Both the transmitter and the receiver
were identical membrane electromagnet instruments.
1875: Thomas Edison experiments with acoustic
telegraphy and in November builds an electro-dynamic receiver
but does not exploit it.
February 11, 1876: Elisha Gray invents a liquid transmitter for
use with a telephone but does not build one.
February 14, 1876, about 9:30 am: Gray or his lawyer brings
Gray's patent caveat for the telephone to the Washington, D.C.
Patent Office (a caveat was a notice of intention to file a
patent application. It was like a patent application, but
without a request for examination, and to notify the patent
office of a possible invention in process).
February 14, 1876, about 11:30 am: Bell's lawyer brings to the
same patent office Bell's patent application for the
telephone. Bell's lawyer requests that it be registered
immediately in the cash receipts blotter.
February 14, 1876, about 1:30 pm: Approximately two hours later, Elisha Gray's patent caveat is registered in the cash blotter. Although his caveat was not a full application, Gray could
have converted it into a patent application and contest Bell's
priority; however, he did not do so because of advice from his lawyer
and his involvement with acoustic telegraphy. The result was
that the patent was awarded to Bell.
March 7, 1876: Bell's U.S. Patent, No. 174,465 for the
telephone is granted.
10 March 1876: Bell first successfully transmits speech,
saying "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" using a
liquid transmitter as described in Gray's caveat, and Bell's
own electromagnetic receiver.
May 16, 1876: Thomas Edison files the first patent application for
acoustic telegraphy for which U.S. patent 182,996 was granted
October 10, 1876.
August 10, 1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the world's first
long distance telephone call, about 6 miles, between Brantford
and Paris, Ontario, Canada.
1876: Hungarian Tivadar Puskas invents the telephone
switchboard exchange
(later working with Edison).
October 9, 1876: Bell makes the first two-way long distance
telephone call between Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts
October 1876: Edison tests his first carbon microphone.
1877: The first experimental Telephone Exchange in Boston.
January 20, 1877: Edison "first [succeeds] in transmitting over
wires many articulated sentences" using carbon granules as a
pressure sensitive variable resistance under the pressure of a
diaphragm.
January 30, 1877: Bell's U.S. Patent No. 186,787 is granted for
an electromagnetic telephone using permanent magnets, iron
diaphragms, and a call bell.
March 4, 1877: Emile Berliner invents a microphone based on
"loose contact" between two metal electrodes, an improvement
on Reis' Telephone, and in April 1877 files a caveat of an
invention in process.
April 1877: A telephone line connects the workshop of Charles
Williams, Jr., located in Boston, to his house in Somerville,
Massachusetts, at 109 Court Street in Boston, where Alexander
Graham Bell and Thomas Watson had previously experimented with
their telephone. The telephones became No. 1 and 2 in the Bell
Telephone Company.
April 27, 1877: Edison files telephone patent applications.
U.S. patents (Nos. 474,230; 474,231; and 474,232) were awarded
to Edison in 1892 over the competing claims of Alexander
Graham Bell, Emile Berliner, Elisha Gray, Amos Dolbear, J.W.
McDonagh, G.B. Richmond, W.L.W. Voeker, J.H. Irwin and Francis
Blake Jr. Edison's carbon granules transmitter and Bell's
electromagnetic receiver are used, with improvements, by the
Bell System for many decades thereafter.
June 4, 1877: Emile Berliner files telephone patent application
that includes a carbon microphone transmitter.
July 9, 1877: The Bell Telephone Company, a common law
joint-stock company, is organized by Alexander Graham Bell's
future father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a lawyer who
becomes its first president.
December 1, 1877: Western Union enters the telephone business
using Edison's superior carbon microphone transmitter.
January 28, 1878: The first commercial North American telephone
exchange is opened in New Haven, Connecticut.
February 4, 1878: Edison demonstrates the telephone between
Menlo Park,
New Jersey, and Philadelphia,
a distance of 210 kilometres (130 mi).
June 14, 1878: The Telephone Company (Bell's Patents) Ltd. is
registered in London. Opened in London on 21 August 1879, it
is Europe's first telephone exchange, followed a couple of
weeks later by one in Manchester.
September 12, 1878: The
Bell Telephone Company sues Western Union for infringing
Bell's patents.
1878: The first Australian telephone trials were made between
Semaphore and Kapunda (and later Adelaide and Port Adelaide)
in South Australia.
Early months of 1879: The Bell Telephone Company is near
bankruptcy and desperate to get a transmitter to equal
Edison's carbon transmitter.
February 17, 1879: Bell Telephone merges with the New England
Telephone Company to form the National Bell Telephone Company.
Theodore Vail takes over operations.
1879: Francis Blake invents a carbon transmitter similar to
Edison's that saves the Bell company from extinction.
August 2, 1879: The Edison Telephone Company of London Ltd,
is registered. It opened in London September 6, 1879.
September 10, 1879: Connolly and McTighe patent a "dial"
telephone exchange, limited in the number of lines to the
number of positions on the dial.
1879: The International Bell Telephone Company (IBTC) of
Brussels, Belgium, was founded by Bell Telephone Company
president Gardiner Greene Hubbard, initially to sell imported
telephones and switchboards in Continental Europe.
International Bell rapidly evolved into an important European
telephone service provider and manufacturer, with major
operations in several countries.
February 19, 1880: The photophone, also called a radiophone, is
invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner
Tainter at Bell's Volta Laboratory. The device allowed for the
transmission of sound on a beam of light.
March 20, 1880: National
Bell Telephone merges with others to form the American Bell
Telephone Company.
April 1, 1880: The world's first wireless telephone call on Bell
and Tainter's photophone (distant precursor to fiber-optic
communications) from the Franklin School in Washington, D.C.
to the window of Bell's laboratory, 213 meters away.
1882: A telephone company — an American Bell affiliate — is set up
in Mexico City.
May 14, 1883: The Adelaide exchange was opened with 48
subscribers.
September 7, 1883: The Port Adelaide exchange was opened, with
21 subscribers.
September 4, 1884: Opening of telephone service between New
York and Boston (235 miles).
March 3, 1885: The American Telephone & Telegraph Company
(AT&T) is incorporated as the long-distance division of
American Bell Telephone Company. It will become the head of
the Bell System on the last day of 1899.
1886: Gilliland's Automatic circuit changer is put into
service between Worcester and Leicester featuring the first
operator dialing allowing one operator to run two exchanges.
1887: Tivadar Puskás introduced the multiplex switchboard,
which had an epochal significance in the further development of
telephone exchange.
January 13, 1887: the Government of the United States moves to
annul the master patent issued to Alexander Graham Bell on the
grounds of fraud and misrepresentation. The case, known as the
'Government Case', is later dropped after it was revealed that
the U.S. Attorney General Augustus Hill Garland had been
given millions of dollars of stock in the company trying to
unseat Bell's telephone patent.
1888: Telephone patent court cases are confirmed by the
Supreme Court.
1889: AT&T becomes the overall holding company for all the
Bell companies.
November 2, 1889: A.G. Smith patents a telegraph switch which
provides for trunks between groups of selectors allowing, for
the first time, fewer trunks than there were lines, as well as
automatic selection of an idle trunk.
March 10, 1891: Almon Strowger patents the Strowger switch, the
first Automatic telephone exchange.
October 30, 1891: The independent Strowger Automatic Telephone
Exchange Company is formed.
May 3, 1892: Thomas Edison awarded patents for the carbon
microphone based on applications lodged in 1877.
October 18, 1892: Opening of telephone service between New York
and Chicago (950 miles).
November 3, 1892: The first Strowger switch goes into operation
in LaPorte, Indiana, with 75 subscribers and capacity for 99.
January 30, 1894: The second fundamental Bell patent for the
telephone expires; Independent telephone companies established,
and independent manufacturing companies (Stromberg-Carlson in
1894 and Kellogg Switchboard & Supply Company in 1897).
December 30, 1899: American Bell Telephone Company is purchased
by its own long-distance subsidiary, American Telephone and
Telegraph (AT&T), to bypass state regulations limiting
capitalization. AT&T assumes leadership role of the Bell
System.
December 25, 1900: John W. Atkins, the manager at International
Ocean Telegraph Company (IOTC), a subsidiary of Western Union
Telegraph Company, made the first international telephone call
over telegraph cable at 9:55 a.m. from his office in Key West to
Havana, Cuba. Atkins was reported in the Florida Times Union
and Citizen as saying, "For a long time there was no sound,
except the roar heard at night sometimes, caused by electric
light current." He continued calling Cuba and finally came
back the words, clear and distinct: "I don't understand you."
February 27, 1901: United States Court of Appeals declares void
Emile Berliner's patent for a telephone transmitter used by
the Bell telephone system
1902: The first Australian interstate calls between Mt. Gambier
and Nelson.
February 26, 1914:
Boston-Washington underground cable commenced commercial
service.
January 16, 1915: The first automatic Panel exchange was
installed at the Mulberry Central Office in Newark, New
Jersey; however, it was a semi-automatic system using non-dial
telephones.
January 25, 1915: The first transcontinental (coast-to-coast)
telephone call (3600 miles), with Thomas Augustus Watson at
333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco receiving a call from
Alexander Graham Bell at 15 Dey Street in New York City,
facilitated by a newly invented vacuum tube amplifier.
October 21, 1915: First transmission of speech across the
Atlantic Ocean by radiotelephone from Arlington, Virginia, to Paris,
France.
1919: The first rotary dial telephones in the Bell System
were installed in Norfolk, Virginia. Note: Telephones that lacked dials
and touch-tone pads were no longer made by the Bell System
after 1978.
1919: AT&T conducts more than 4,000 measurements of people's
heads to gauge the best dimensions of standard headsets so
that callers' lips would be near the microphone when holding
handsets up to their ears.
July 16, 1920: The world's first radiotelephone service commences
public service between Los Angeles, California, and Santa Catalina
Island.
April 11, 1921: The opening of deep sea cable from Key West, Florida, to
Havana, Cuba (115 miles).
December 22, 1923: The opening of a second transcontinental telephone
line via a southern route.
March 7, 1926: The first transatlantic telephone call, from London
to New York.
January 7, 1927: Transatlantic telephone service is inaugurated
for commercial service (3500 miles).
January 17, 1927: The opening of a third transcontinental telephone
line via a northern route.
April 7, 1927: The world's first videophone call via an
electro-mechanical AT&T unit, from Washington, D.C., to New
York City, by then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
May 28, 1927: Rotary dial service was started from midnight.
December 8, 1929: The opening of commercial ship-to-shore telephone
service.
April 3, 1930: The opening of transoceanic telephone service to
Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and subsequently to all other
South American countries.
April 25, 1935: The first telephone call around the world by wire
and radio.
December 8, 1937: The opening of a fourth transcontinental telephone
line.
1941: Multi-frequency dialing is introduced for operators in
Baltimore, Maryland.
1946: National Numbering Plan (area codes).
1946: The first commercial mobile phone call.
1946: Bell Labs develops the germanium point-contact
transistor.
December
1947: W. Rae Young and Douglas H. Ring, Bell Labs
engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for provisioning of mobile
telephone service.
1948: Phil Porter, a Bell Labs engineer, proposed that cell
towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the
centers and have directional antennas pointing in three
directions.
June 30, 1948: The first public demonstration of the transistor by
Bell Telephone Laboratories.
November 10, 1951: Direct Distance Dialing (DDD) first offered
on trial basis in Englewood, New Jersey, to 11 selected major
cities across the United States; this service grew rapidly
across major cities during the 1950s.
1955: The laying of trans-Atlantic cable TAT-1 began - 36
circuits, later increased to 48 by reducing the bandwidth from
4 kHz to 3 kHz.
1958: Modems used for direct connection via voice phone lines.
1960: The ESS-1.
1960's: Bell Labs developed the electronics for cellular
phones.
1961: Initiation of Touch-Tone service trials.
1962: T-1 service in Skokie, Illinois.
1963: The first publicly available push-button telephones were
released, utilizing DTMF (touch tone) technology, by Bell
Systems/Western Electric, in the towns of Carnegie and
Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
1965: first geosynchronous communications satellite - 240
circuits or one TV signal.
May 1965: No. 1 ESS
introduced in Succasunna, New Jersey.
1970: The ESS-2 electronic switch.
1970: Modular telephone cords and jacks are introduced.
1970: Amos E. Joel, Jr. of Bell Labs invented the "call
handoff" system for "cellular mobile communication system"
(patent granted 1972).
Late 1970s: The 1AESS
Switch incorporating the 1A Processor was a plug compatible
upgrade, using smaller remreed switches, fewer relays, a
faster CPU, and disk storage.
1971: AT&T submitted a proposal for cellular phone service to
the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
April 3, 1973: Motorola employee Martin Cooper placed the first
hand-held cell phone call to Joel Engel, head of research at
AT&T's Bell Labs, while talking on the first Motorola DynaTAC
prototype.
1973: Packet switched voice connections over ARPANET with
Network Voice Protocol (NVP).
1976: Kazuo Hashimoto invented Caller ID
1978: Bell Labs launched a trial of the first commercial
cellular network in Chicago using Advanced Mobile Phone System
(AMPS).
1978: World's first NMT phone call in Tampere, Finland.
1979: VoIP - NVP running on top of early versions of IP.
1981: The world's first fully automatic mobile phone system NMT is started in Sweden and Norway.
1981: BT introduces the British Telephone Sockets system.
1982: The FCC approved AT&T's proposal for AMPS and allocated
frequencies in the 824-894 MHz band.
1982: Caller ID patented by Carolyn Doughty, Bell Labs.
1983: The last manual telephone switchboard in Maine is retired.
1984: AT&T completes the divestiture of its local operating
companies. This forms a new AT&T (long distance service and
equipment sales) and the Baby Bells.
Source: Wikipedia.org.
Many thanks to the contributor(s).
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