Alexander Graham Bell worked on improving the wired telegraph and invented the analogue telephone by connecting two sets of microphone and speaker by a wire. This was developed into a commercial system by routing telephone lines from each subscriber to a local exchange where operators would physically connect the parties using a plug board.
Alexander Graham Bell was born on 3 March 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He attended universities in Edinburgh and London and emigrated to the United States in 1871.
Bell was interested in sound and phonetics and worked on developing the telegraph. He discovered that a single pitch sound wave could be reproduced by using an oscillating current to make a vibration and realised that the human voice was composition of many such sound waves.
Did You Know?
The first words spoken over the telephone were
"Mr Watson come here I want to see you", spoken by Alexander Graham Bell to his (somewhat surprised) assistant in another room.
Bell developed his first version of what came to be known as the telephone in 1875 and first publicly demonstrated it in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
The Bell Telephone Company was established in 1877 to provide a commercial service and proved the foundation of the US telecommunications industry.
Bell died on 2 August 1922.
US 174,465 “Improvement in Telegraphy” 7 March 1876
Click here to read the original patent
