Telephone

The telephone was patented in the United States by Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born teacher of the deaf working in Boston, who built on his experiments with transmitting speech by electrical signals. His patent was granted in March 1876, and a few days later, helped by his assistant Thomas Watson, he transmitted the first clearly understood sentence. The electrical engineer Elisha Gray had filed a related notice on the same day as Bell's application, and the Italian inventor Antonio Meucci had demonstrated an earlier device, so the question of priority has been disputed ever since. Bell publicly demonstrated the invention at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, and the Bell Telephone Company was founded in 1877. Telephone networks spread rapidly and changed business and social life.

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