The Evolution of the Telephone Essay Example

27, 1791, and educated at Yale College (now Yale University).

He also invented a code, now known as the Morse code, for use with his telegraph instrument. In 1843 the Congress of the United States appropriated US$30,000 for Morse to construct an experimental telegraph line between Washington, D. C. , and Baltimore, Maryland. The line was successfully installed, and on May 24, 1844, Morse sent the first message: “What hath God wrought! ” Morse was subsequently involved in much litigation over his claim to the invention of the telegraph, and the courts decided in his favor. He received many honors. Later he experimented with submarine cable telegraphy.

Morse died in New York on April 2, 1872. Alexander Graham Bell, a pioneer in the field of telecommunications was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Bell had been interested in the education of deaf people; which lead him to invent the microphone and, in 1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, at the time it was called the “electrical speech machine”. In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company. News of his invention quickly spread throughout the country, even throughout Europe. By 1878, Bell had set up the first telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut.

By 1884, long distance connections were made between Boston, Massachusetts and New York City. Bell's "electrical speech machine" paved the way for the Information Superhighway. In its primitive days, the telephone was all but cumbersome. It means when someone was to make a call; the caller had to go through an operator to connect the caller to another party. The telephone was also better

at receiving than transmitting. The microphone was not sensitive enough. There were also switchboards in which an operator had to manually remove one socket to connect to another.

As the demand of telephone use grew, the need to replace the switchboard system had to be done. When the telephone progressed, so was the subscription of service. From the time of its invention to 1880, there were 50000 subscribers of the telephone. However, it took nearly a hundred years for the system to improve dramatically. The operators were eliminated because the users could now make their own connection without calling the operators first. By the 1960’s - U. S. Telephones total 80,969,000; world's total reaches 159,200,000; telephone companies were forming everywhere and by 1964, some 2,535 companies were in existence.

The more the telephones improve, the more the people wanted more from it. In the twentieth century, the telephone is the main medium to reach just about anyone. It is also the favored medium of communication in the business world. Nowadays, the telephone system can be configured to suit a business' needs. At my job for example, the telephone has multiple functions. One is the paging system to reach someone; it can be used to make conference calls to multiple companies at the same time. With the invention of cellular phones, one can be reached anywhere in the world and be connected to the internet; as long as you have a signal of course.

Over the centuries, people have been striving towards a fast, reliable means of communication. At first, those gaps were bridged with language, usable in face-to-face encounters and then written

language, which could be transported over vast distances, though the timeliness of the message left something to be desired. Some civilizations used methods other than written languages to communicate messages accurately across long distances. Perhaps the most famous example would be the Incans of South America.

When one village had to deliver a message to another village, several colored pieces of string would be knotted in a specific pattern then run to the neighboring village to deliver the message. Other peoples simply used oral messengers to carry the communication to others. Today we use the telephone, one of our most valuable communication tools. I personally cannot function with out it I feel naked without it. I can also say that we have not see everything that a phone can do; and in the future it will be amazing, what our technology will become and how the telephone will stand up against other competition.