Timeline of the telephone


This timeline of the telephone covers landline, radio, and cellular telephony technologies and provides many important dates in the history of the telephone.

1667 to 1875

  • 1667: Robert Hooke creates an acoustic string telephone that conveys sounds over a taut extended wire by mechanical vibrations.
  • 1844: Innocenzo Manzetti first suggests the idea of an electric "speaking telegraph", or telephone.
  • 1849: Antonio Meucci developed a voice-communication apparatus that several sources credit as the first telephone.
  • 1854: Charles Bourseul publishes a description of a make-and-break telephone transmitter and receiver in L'Illustration, but does not construct a working instrument.
  • 1854: Meucci demonstrates an electric voice-operated device in New York, but it is not clear what kind of device he demonstrated.
  • 1860: Johann Philipp Reis of Germany demonstrates a make-and-break transmitter after the design of Bourseul and a knitting-needle receiver. Witnesses said they heard human voices being transmitted.
  • 1861: Johann Philipp Reis transfers voice electrically over a distance of 340 feet with his Reis telephone. To prove that speech can be recognized successfully at the receiving end, he uses the phrase "The horse does not eat cucumber salad" as an example because this phrase is hard to understand acoustically in German.
  • 1864: In an attempt to give his musical automaton a voice, Innocenzo Manzetti invents the 'speaking telegraph'. He shows no interest in patenting his device, but it is reported in newspapers.
  • 1865: Meucci reads of Manzetti's invention and writes to the editors of two newspapers claiming priority and quoting his first experiment in 1849. He writes "I do not wish to deny Mr. Manzetti his invention, I only wish to observe that two thoughts could be found to contain the same discovery, and that by uniting the two ideas one can more easily reach the certainty about a thing this important."
  • 1871: Meucci files a patent caveat for a Sound Telegraph, but it does not describe an electromagnetic telephone.
  • 1872: Elisha Gray founds the Western Electric Manufacturing Company.
  • 1872: Professor Vanderwyde demonstrates Reis's telephone in New York.
  • July 1873: Thomas Edison notes varying resistance in carbon grains due to pressure, and builds a rheostat based on the principle but abandons it because of its sensitivity to vibration.
  • May 1874: Gray invents an electromagnet device for transmitting musical tones. Some of his receivers use a metallic diaphragm.
  • July 1874: Alexander Graham Bell conceives the theoretical concept for the telephone while vacationing at his parents' farm near Brantford, Ontario, Canada. Alexander Melville Bell records notes of his son's conversation in his personal journal.
  • 29 December 1874: Gray demonstrates his musical tones device and transmits "familiar melodies through telegraph wire" at the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois.
  • 4 May 1875: Bell conceives of using varying resistance in a wire conducting electric current to create a varying current amplitude.
  • 2 June 1875: Bell transmits the sound of a plucked steel reed using electromagnet instruments.
  • 1 July 1875: Bell uses a bi-directional "gallows" telephone that was able to transmit "indistinct but voice-like sounds" rather than clear speech. Both the transmitter and the receiver were identical membrane electromagnet instruments.
  • 1875: Thomas Edison experiments with acoustic telegraphy and, in November, builds an electro-dynamic receiver but does not exploit it.

1876 to 1878

  • 11 February 1876: Elisha Gray invents a liquid transmitter for use with a telephone, but he did not make one.
  • 14 February 1876
  • * about 9:30am: Gray or his lawyer brings Gray's patent caveat for the telephone to the Washington, D.C. Patent Office.
  • * about 11:30am: Bell's lawyer brings to the same patent office Bell's patent application for the telephone. Bell's lawyer requests that it be registered immediately in the cash receipts blotter.
  • * about 1:30pm: Approximately two hours later Elisha Gray's patent caveat is registered in the cash blotter. Although his caveat was not a full application, Gray could have converted it into a patent application and contested Bell's priority, but did not do so because of advice from his lawyer and his involvement with acoustic telegraphy. The result was that the patent was awarded to Bell.
  • 7 March 1876: Bell's U.S. Patent, No. 174,465 for the telephone is granted.
  • 10 March 1876: Bell first successfully transmits speech, saying "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" using a liquid transmitter as described in Gray's caveat, and Bell's own electromagnetic receiver.
  • 16 May 1876: Thomas Edison files first patent application for acoustic telegraphy for which U.S. patent 182,996 was granted 10 October 1876.
  • 25 June 1876: Bell exhibits his telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where it draws enthusiastic reactions from Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil and Lord Kelvin, attracting the attention of the press and resulting in the first announcements of the invention to the general public. Lord Kelvin describes the telephone as "the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph".
  • 10 August 1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the world's first long-distance telephone call, one-way, not reciprocal, over a distance of about 6 miles, between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, Canada.
  • 1876: Hungarian Tivadar Puskás invents the [telephone exchange|telephone Telephone switchboard|switchboard exchange].
  • 9 October 1876: Bell makes the first two-way long-distance telephone call between Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts.
  • October 1876: Edison tests his first carbon microphone.
  • 1877: The first experimental telephone exchange in Boston.
  • 20 January 1877: Edison "first in transmitting over wires many articulated sentences" using carbon granules as a pressure-sensitive varying resistance under the pressure of a diaphragm.
  • 30 January 1877: Bell's U.S. Patent No. 186,787 is granted for an electromagnetic telephone using permanent magnets, iron diaphragms, and a call bell.
  • 4 March 1877: Emile Berliner invents a microphone based on "loose contact" between two metal electrodes, an improvement on Reis' Telephone, and in April 1877 files a caveat of an invention in process.
  • April 1877: A telephone line connects the workshop of Charles Williams, Jr., located in Boston, to his house in Somerville, Massachusetts, at 109 Court Street in Boston, where Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson had previously experimented with their telephone. The telephones became No. 1 and 2 in the Bell Telephone Company.
  • 27 April 1877: Edison files telephone patent applications. U.S. patents were awarded to Edison in 1892 over the competing claims of Alexander Graham Bell, Emile Berliner, Elisha Gray, Amos Dolbear, J.W. McDonagh, G.B. Richmond, W.L.W. Voeker, J.H. Irwin and Francis Blake Jr. Edison's carbon granules transmitter and Bell's electromagnetic receiver are used, with improvements, by the Bell system for many decades thereafter.
  • 4 June 1877: Emile Berliner files telephone patent application that includes a carbon microphone transmitter.
  • 9 July 1877: The Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint-stock company, is organized by Alexander Graham Bell's future father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a lawyer who becomes its first president.
  • 6 October 1877: the Scientific American publishes the invention from Bell – at that time still without a ringer.
  • 25 October 1877: the article in the Scientific American is discussed at the Telegraphenamt in Berlin
  • November 1877: First permanent telephone connection in UK between two business in Manchester using imported Bell instruments.
  • 12 November 1877: The first commercial telephone company enters telephone business in Friedrichsberg close to Berlin using the Siemens pipe as ringer and telephone devices built by Siemens.
  • 1 December 1877: Western Union enters the telephone business using Edison's superior carbon microphone transmitter.
  • 14 January 1878: Bell demonstrates the device to Queen Victoria and gives her an opportunity to try it. Calls are made to Cowes, Southampton and London, the first long-distance calls in the UK. The queen asks to buy the equipment that was used, but Bell offers to make a model specifically for her.
  • 28 January 1878: The first commercial North American telephone exchange is opened in New Haven, Connecticut.
  • 4 February 1878: Edison demonstrates the telephone between Menlo Park, New Jersey and Philadelphia.
  • 14 June 1878: The Telephone Company Ltd. is registered in London. Opened in London on 21 August 1879, it is Europe's first telephone exchange, followed a couple of weeks later by one in Manchester.
  • 12 September 1878: the Bell Telephone Company sues Western Union for infringing Bell's patents.
  • 1878: The first Australian telephone trials were made between Semaphore and Kapunda in South Australia.

1879 to 1919

1920 to 1969

  • 18 April 1920: At the moment of funeral services for former AT&T President Theodore N. Vail, telephone service was halted across the United States from 11:00 to 11:01 a.m. Eastern Time for the first time. The moment of silence affected 12 million AT&T telephones.
  • 16 July 1920: World's first radiotelephone service commences public service between Los Angeles and Santa Catalina Island.
  • 11 April 1921: Opening of deep sea cable from Key West, Florida, to Havana, Cuba.
  • 2 Aug 1922: For only the second time in history, telephone lines were halted for one minute across the United States, on the day of the death of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone.
  • 22 December 1923: Opening of second transcontinental telephone line via a southern route.
  • 7 March 1926: First transatlantic telephone call, from London to New York.
  • 7 January 1927: Transatlantic telephone service inaugurated for commercial service.
  • 17 January 1927: Opening of third transcontinental telephone line via a northern route.
  • 7 April 1927: world's first videophone call via an electro-mechanical AT&T unit, from Washington, D.C. to New York City, by then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
  • 8 December 1929: Opening of commercial ship-to-shore telephone service.
  • 3 April 1930: Opening of transoceanic telephone service to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay and subsequently to all other South American countries.
  • 1931: The Ericsson DBH 1001 telephone was the first telephone without a separate ringer box.
  • 25 April 1935: First telephone call around the world by wire and radio.
  • 1937: The Western Electric type 302 telephone becomes available for service in the United States.
  • 8 December 1937: Opening of fourth transcontinental telephone line.
  • 1941: Multi-frequency dialing introduced for operators in Baltimore, Maryland
  • 1942: Telephone production is halted at Western Electric until 1945 for civilian distribution due to the retooling of factories for military equipment during World War II.
  • 1946: National Numbering Plan
  • 1946: first commercial mobile phone call
  • 1946: Bell Labs develops the germanium point-contact transistor
  • 1947: December, W. Rae Young and Douglas H. Ring, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for provisioning of mobile telephone service.
  • 1948: Phil Porter, a Bell Labs engineer, proposed that cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas pointing in 3 directions.
  • 1950: The Western Electric Type 500 telephone becomes available in the United States after announcement in 1949.
  • 30 June 1948: First public demonstration of the transistor by Bell Telephone Laboratories.
  • 10 November 1951: direct distance dialing first offered on trial basis at Englewood, New Jersey, to 11 selected major cities across the United States; this service grew rapidly across major cities during the 1950s
  • 1955: the laying of trans-Atlantic cable TAT-1 began – 36 circuits, later increased to 48 by reducing the bandwidth from 4 kHz to 3 kHz
  • 1957: First semiconductor oxiode planar transitors by Frosch and Derick at Bell Labs.
  • 1958: Modems used for direct connection via voice phone lines
  • 1959: The Princess telephone is introduced in the Bell System in the United States.
  • 1959: UKs first public car radio-telephone service opens in Liverpool and Manchester
  • 1959: Following Frosch and Derick research at Bell Labs, Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng proposed a silicon MOS transistor in 1959 at Bell Labs.
  • 1960: A working MOSFET is built by a team at Bell Labs. E. E. LaBate and E. I. Povilonis made the device; M. O. Thurston, L. A. D’Asaro, and J. R. Ligenza developed the diffusion processes, and H. K. Gummel and R. Lindner characterized the device.
  • 1 November 1960: The Bell System begins testing its push-button phone, starting with service in Findlay, Ohio.
  • 1960: Bell Labs conducts extensive field trial of an electronic central office in Morris, Illinois, known at the Morris System.
  • 1960s: Bell Labs developed the electronics for cellular phones
  • 1961: Initiation of Touch-Tone service trials
  • 1962: T-1 service in Skokie, Illinois
  • 18 November 1963: AT&T commences the first subscriber Touch-Tone service in the towns of Carnegie and Greensburg, Pennsylvania, using push-button telephones that replaced rotary dial instruments.
  • 25 November 1963: For only the third time in history, telephone service in the United States was halted for one minute. At noon, Eastern time, AT&T operators bowed their heads in mourning for late U.S. President John F. Kennedy, on the day of his state funeral.
  • 31 May 1965: The world's first electronic switching system commences commercial service in Succasunna, New Jersey, in form of the 1ESS.
  • 1965: first geosynchronous communications satellite – 240 circuits or one TV signal
  • 1965: The Trimline telephone is introduced by Western Electric for use in the Bell System.

1970 to 1999

2000 to present