The Significance of the Telephone

The telephone was an extremely innovative invention that impacted the world greatly.  The telephone's main purpose was to make communication quicker and more efficient.  With the creation of the telephone, long distance communication became much easier. 

Officially, the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.  However, others had the idea and were also in the works of creating the telephone.  Essentially, it was a race to see who would get credit for the invention.  An Italian innovator named Antonio Meucci, is credited with inventing the first basic phone in the year 1849.  A Frenchman named Charles Bourseul, is known for conceiving a phone in the year 1854.  Despite all of this, Alexander Graham Bell is the one who won the first U.S patent for the telephone in 1876.

After the telephone was invented, it continued to advance at a healthy rate.  In 1878, the first telephone line was developed.  Then, about three years later, around 49,000 telephones were put in use.  In 1880, Bell formed the American Bell Telephone Company.  Then, in 1885, American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) was formed.  AT&T annihilated all other telephone communications for the next century.  Bell System employees intentionally belittled the reputation of the U.S. telephone system to drive down the stock prices of all other phone companies and to make it easier for Bell to acquire smaller competitors.  This may seem unethical but it was indisputably a smart business move.

The invention of the telephone also provided privacy.  Instead of people sending letters to one another, and risking the interception of their mail, they could instead make a simple phone call.  Unfortunately, wealthy people tended to be the only people with telephones in their home so most people had to journey to a location with a public telephone like a general store.

The use of telephones continued to expand.  By 1948, the 30 millionth phone was connected in the United States, and by the 1960s, there were more than 80 million phone hookups in the U.S. and 160 million in the world.  By 1980, there were more than 175 million telephone subscriber lines in the U.S.  In 1993, the first digital cellular network went online in Orlando, Florida and by 1995 there were 25 million cellular phone subscribers, and that number exploded at the with digital cellular phone service expected to replace land-line phones for most U.S. customers by as early as 2010.

Today, just about everyone has a phone, well a cell phone that is.  The original telephone is now more antiquated and the cellular phone is much more relevant.  It's rare to see a person without a phone.  The advancement of the telephone has made them multipurposed.  The invention of telephone changed the way of the world.  It seems the purpose of every invention is to make something either faster, more efficient, more accessible or all of the above.... and the telephone did just that.

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