Sounds in Communication

The Evolution of Telephone

Posted on February 21, 2014 Updated on February 21, 2014

The telephone emerged from the creation and successive improvements of the electrical telegraph. In 1804 Catalan polymath and scientist Francisco Salva Campillo constructed an electrochemical telegraph.^[6] An electromagnetic telegraph was created by Baron Schilling in 1832. Carl Friedrich Gauß and Wilhelm Weber built another electromagnetic telegraph in 1833 in Göttingen.

The first commercial electrical telegraph was constructed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and entered use on the Great Western Railway in England. It ran for 13 mi (21 km) from Paddington station to West Drayton and came into operation on April 9, 1839.

Another electrical telegraph was independently developed and patented in the United States in 1837 by Samuel Morse. His assistant, Alfred Vail, developed theMorse code signaling alphabet with Morse. America’s first telegram was sent by Morse on January 6, 1838, across 2 miles (3 km) of wiring.

During the second half of the 19th century inventors tried to find ways of sending multiple telegraph messages simultaneously over a single telegraph wire by using different modulated audio frequencies for each message. These inventors included Charles Bourseul, Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray, and Alexander Graham Bell. Their efforts to develop acoustic telegraphy in order to significantly reduce the cost of telegraph messages led directly to the invention of the telephone, the speaking telegraph.

The Evolution of Telephone