The telephone is an instrument for reproducing speech at a distance from the source. It was invented (or rather patented) by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 - the invention of the telephone being claimed also by Gray, of Chicago and several others. The possibility of such an instrument was discovered previous to 1873, but the first satisfactory results were not obtained until 1877, when Bell completed and put into practical use a telephone line between Salem and Boston, Gray achieving a like result the same year in a line set up between Chicago and Milwaukee, a distance of eighty-five miles. By 1880 there were in existence in America 148 telephone companies and private concerns, operating 34,305 miles of wire which by 1893 had risen to 308,000 miles. The Bell Company was the most extensive American telephone company in the 19th century. Two suits were brought against the patent, but both failed.
Long distance telephony was developed in the 1920s following the experiments of Dr H. W. Nichols, with links between major cities in the continents introduced in 1927. Research Telephone
Abbreviations
SciTech
Research Telephone