The modern telephone is the culmination of work done by many individuals. Alexander Graham Bell was the first to patent the telephone, an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically", after experimenting with many primitive sound transmitters and receivers. However, the history of the invention of the telephone is a confusing collection of claims and counterclaims, made no less confusing by the many lawsuits which attempted to resolve the patent claims of several individuals.
This article covers the early years 1844-1898, from conception of the idea of an electric voice-transmission device to commercially successful telephones in the late 19th century. This is a summary of the attempts, success and failures of individual inventors during that half century.
The story begins with a non-electrical string telephone or "lover's telephone" that has been known for centuries, comprising two diaphragms connected by a taut string or wire. Sound waves are carried as mechanical vibrations along the string or wire from one diaphragm to the other. The classic example is the tin can telephone, a children's toy made by connecting the two ends of a string to the bottoms of two metal cans, paper cups or similar items. The essential idea of this toy was that a diaphragm can collect voice sounds from the air, as in the ear, and can also transmit voice sounds through a string or wire for reproduction at a distance.
Telephone Pioneers
Innocenzo Manzetti
Main article: Innocenzo Manzetti
Innocenzo Manzetti considered the idea of a telephone as early as 1844, and may have made one in 1864, as an enhancement to an automaton built by him in 1849.Charles Bourseul
Main article: Charles Bourseul
In 1854 Charles Bourseul, a French telegrapher, published a plan for conveying sounds and even speech by electricity in the magazine L'Illustration (Paris).[1] Bourseul's ideas were also published in Didaskalia (Frankfurt am Main) on September 28, 1854: "Suppose", he explained, “that a man speaks near a movable disc sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice; that this disc alternately makes and breaks the currents from a battery: you may have at a distance another disc which will simultaneously execute the same vibrations.... It is certain that, in a more or less distant future, speech will be transmitted by electricity. I have made experiments in this direction; they are delicate and demand time and patience, but the approximations obtained promise a favourable result."This make-or-break signaling was able to transmit tones and some vowels, but since it did not follow the analog shape of the sound wave (the contact was pure digital, on or off) it could not transmit consonants, or complex sounds. Bourseul's phrase "make and break the current" was unfortunate, because it discredited later work by Philipp Reis who successfully transmitted faint voice sounds with unbroken current.[2]
[edit] Johann Philipp Reis
Main article: Johann Philipp Reis
In 1860 Johann Philipp Reis produced a device that could transmit musical notes, indistinct speech, and occasionally distinct speech. The first sentence spoken on it was "Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat" (the horse doesn't eat cucumber salad). See Reis' telephone for a detailed description. In the Reis transmitter, a diaphragm was attached to a needle that pressed against a metal contact. This resembled the make-or-break design of Bourseul, although Reis used the term "molecular action" (molekular Bewegung) to describe the contact points of his transmitter.[3] The Reis transmitter was very difficult to operate, since the relative position of the needle and the contact were critical to the device's operation. This can be called a "telephone", since it did transmit voice sounds over distance, but was hardly a commercially practical telephone in the modern sense, as it failed to reliably transmit a good copy of any supplied sound. Thomas Edison tested the Reis equipment and found that "single words, uttered as in reading, speaking and the like, were perceptible indistinctly, notwithstanding here also the inflections of the voice, the modulations of interrogation, wonder, command, etc., attained distinct expression."[4]Prior to 1947, the Reis device was tested by the British company Standard Telephones and Cables (STC). The results also confirmed it could faintly transmit and receive speech. At the time STC was bidding for a contract with Alexander Graham Bell's American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and the results were covered up by STC's chairman Sir Frank Gill to maintain Bell's reputation.
