Who invented the telephone?  You would all answer “Alexander Graham Bell”, right?  Me, too… until I started researching for this lightly informative series on the history of communications in America.  Apparently there’s a whole mess of controversy I didn’t know about, and I bet you didn’t, either. 

The generally accepted story is that Alexander Graham Bell was working to improve the telegraph, which had been successfully in use for years but could only transmit one message at a time.  Bell’s background in music and sound inspired him with the idea that he could transmit multiple messages at the same time by using signals of differing pitch, or sound–he called it the “harmonic telegraph.”  This is what he had received financial backing for.  However, while working on the harmonic telegraph, he realized he could hear sound over a wire.  Working with his assistant, electrician Thomas Watson, he then perfected the idea and the means of transmitting sound (speech) using electrical signals.  “Mr. Watson, come here.  I want to see you” was the first thing he said. 

Here’s where the controversy comes in:  there’s a new book out this month called The Telephone Gambit:  Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (see exerpts from the book here) that maintains that Bell stole his ideas for the telephone from Elisha Gray.  It is true that Elisha Gray filed his patent for the telephone mere hours after Bell, in February 1876.  An extensive legal battle ensued, which Bell won. 

And, there are a large number of people who claim that Italian immigrant named Antonia Meucci invented the telephone, but that through bad luck and poverty, he failed to establish a patent on it.  There’s much more detail in this article, ” and justice for all.”  It’s significant–in 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution endorsing Meucci as the inventor of the telephone because he had demonstrated his invention as early as 1860 and had a description of it in an Italian-language newspaper in New York. 

Whoever’s going to end up with the credit for inventing the telephone, being able to speak to someone in real time and get an immediate response revolutionized life and business in America.   Sit for just a second and really think about how mind-boggling that would have been…going from sending letters across the country by Pony Express to Morse-code-clicking with a telegraph to actual speech.  Building on that, we progressed from switchboard operators (who could listen in on your call) to party lines (so your neighbors could listen in on your call) to private lines with call-waiting to cordless phones to….cell phones!  Coming up next. 

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