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Friday, November 26, 2010

Timeline of the telephone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Timeline of the telephone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1844 to 1875


Innocenzo Manzetti

Antonio Meucci

Charles Bourseul

Johann Philipp Reis

Elisha gray

Thomas Edison

Alexander Graham Bell

Thomas Augustus Watson

Tivadar Puskás

Emile Berliner

Charles Sumner Tainter

Theodore Newton Vail
  • 1844: Innocenzo Manzetti first mooted the idea of a “speaking telegraph” (telephone).
  • 1849: Antonio Meucci demonstrates a communicating device to individuals in Havana. It is disputed if this is an electromagnetic telephone, but is said to involve direct transmission of electricity into the user's body.
  • 1854: Charles Bourseul publishes a description of a make-break telephone transmitter and receiver in L'Illustration, (Paris) but does not construct a working instrument
  • 1854: Antonio 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-break transmitter after the design of Bourseul and a knitting needle receiver. Witnesses said they heard human voices being transmitted.
  • 1861: Johann Philipp Reis manages to transfer voice electrically over a distance of 340 feet, see Reis' telephone.
  • 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." If he reads Meucci's offer of collaboration, Manzetti does not respond.
  • 1871: Antonio Meucci files a patent caveat (a statement of intention to patent)[1] for a Sound Telegraph, but it does not describe an electromagnetic telephone.
  • 1872: Elisha Gray founded Western Electric Manufacturing Company.
  • 1872: Professor Vanderwyde demonstrated Reis's telephone in New York.
  • July 1873: Thomas Edison notes variable resistance in carbon grains due to pressure, builds a rheostat based on the principle but abandons it because of its sensitivity to vibration.
  • May 1874: Gray invents electromagnet device for transmitting musical tones. Some of his receivers use a metallic diaphragm.
  • 29 December 1874: Gray demonstrates his musical tones device and transmitted "familiar melodies through telegraph wire" at the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois.
  • 2 June 1875: Alexander Graham 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 voicelike sounds" but not 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 liquid transmitter for use with a telephone, but does not build one.
  • 14 February 1876: (about 9:30am) Gray or his lawyer brings to the Washington, D.C. patent office Gray's caveat for the telephone. (A caveat was like a patent application without claims to notify the patent office of an invention in process.)
  • 14 February 1876: (about 11:30am) Bell's lawyer brings to the same patent office Bell's patent application for the telephone. Bell's lawyer requested that it be registered immediately in the cash receipts blotter.
  • 14 February 1876: (about 1:30pm) Approximately two hours later Elisha Gray's caveat was registered in the cash blotter. Although his caveat was not a full application, Gray could have converted it into a patent application, 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.[2]
  • 7 March 1876: Bell's US patent No. 174,465 for the telephone is granted.
  • 10 March 1876: Bell transmits speech "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" using a liquid transmitter as described in Gray's caveat, and an electromagnetic receiver.
  • 16 May 1876: Thomas Edison files first patent application for acoustic telegraphy for which US patent 182,996 was granted October 10, 1876.
  • 10 August 1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the world's first long distance telephone call, about 6 miles between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, Canada.
  • 1876: Hungarian Tivadar Puskas invented the telephone switchboard exchange (later working with Edison).
  • 9 October 1876: Bell makes the first two-way long distance telephone call between Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
  • October 1876: Thomas Edison tests his first carbon microphone.
  • January 1878: First North American telephone exchange is opened in New Haven, Connecticut.
  • 20 January 1877: Edison "first succeeded in transmitting over wires many articulated sentences" using carbon granules as a pressure sensitive variable resistance under the pressure of a diaphragm (Josephson, p143).
  • 30 January 1877: Bell's US patent No. 186,787 is granted for an electro-magnetic 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 the 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.[3]
  • 27 April 1877: Thomas Edison files telephone patent application. The US patents (Nos. 474,230, 474,231 and 474,232) were awarded to Edison in 1892 over the competing claims of Alexander Graham Bell, Emile Berliner, Elisha Gray, A E Dolbear, J W McDonagh, G B Richmond, W L W Voeker, J H Irwin and Francis Blake Jr.[4] Edison's carbon granules transmitter and Bell's electromagnetic receiver were used, with improvements, by the Bell system for many decades thereafter (Josephson, p 146).
  • 4 June 1877: Emile Berliner files telephone patent application that includes a carbon microphone transmitter.
  • 9 July 1877: Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint stock company, organized by Alexander Graham Bell's future father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard.
  • 1 December 1877: Western Union enters the telephone business using Thomas Edison's superior carbon microphone transmitter.
  • 4 February 1878: Thomas Edison demonstrates the telephone between Menlo Park, New Jersey and Philadelphia, a distance of 210 km.
  • 14 June 1878: The Telephone Company Ltd (Bell's Patents) registered, London. Opened in London 21 August 1879 - Europe's first telephone exchange.
  • 12 September 1878: the Bell Telephone Company sues Western Union for infringing Bell's patents.

1879 to 1919

  • early months of 1879: The Bell Telephone Company is near bankruptcy and desperate to get a transmitter to equal Edison's carbon transmitter.
  • 17 February 1879: Bell Telephone merges with the New England Telephone Company to form the National Bell Telephone Company. Theodore Vail takes over operations.
  • 1879: Francis Blake invents a carbon transmitter similar to Edison's that saves the Bell company from extinction.
  • 2 August 1879: The Edison Telephone Company of London Ltd, registered. Opened in London 6 September 1879.
  • 10 September 1879: Connolly and McTighe patent a "dial" telephone exchange (limited in the number of lines to the number of positions on the dial.).
  • 19 February 1880: The photophone, also known as a radiophone, is invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter at Bell's Volta Laboratory.[5][6] The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light.
  • 20 March 1880: National Bell Telephone merges with others to form the American Bell Telephone Company.
  • 1 April 1880: world's first wireless telephone call on Bell and Tainter's photophone (distant precursor to fiber-optic communications) from the Franklin School in Washington, D.C. to the window of Bell's laboratory, 213 meters away.[7][8]
  • 1882: A telephone company—an American Bell affiliate—is set up in Mexico City.
  • 1885: The American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) is formed.
  • 1886: Gilliland's Automatic circuit changer is put into service between Worcester and Leicester featuring the first operator dialing allowing one operator to run two exchanges.
  • 13 January 1887: the Government of the United States moves to annul the master patent issued to Alexander Graham Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation. The case, known as the 'Government Case', is later dropped after it was revealed that the U.S. Attorney General, Augustus Hill Garland‎ had been given millions of dollars of stock in the company trying to unseat Bell's telephone patent.
  • 1888: Telephone patent court cases are confirmed by the Supreme Court, see The Telephone Cases
  • 1889: AT&T becomes the overall holding company for all the Bell companies.
  • 2 November 1889: A. G. Smith patents a telegraph switch which provides for trunks between groups of selectors allowing for the first time, fewer trunks than there are lines, and automatic selection of an idle trunk.
  • 10 March 1891: Almon Strowger patents the Strowger switch the first Automatic telephone exchange.
  • 30 October 1891: The independent Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange company is formed.
  • 3 May 1892: Thomas Edison awarded patents for the carbon microphone based on applications lodged in 1877.
  • 3 November 1892: The first Strowger switch goes into operation in LaPorte, Indiana with 75 subscribers and capacity for 99.
  • 30 January 1894: The second fundamental Bell patent for the telephone expire; Independent telephone companies established, and independent manufacturing companies (Stromberg-Carlson in 1894 and Kellogg Switchboard & Supply Company in 1897).
  • 30 December 1899: American Bell Telephone Company is purchased by its own long-distance subsidiary, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) to bypass state regulations limiting capitalization. AT&T assumes leadership role of the Bell System.
  • 27 February 1901: United States Court of Appeal declares void Emile Berliner's patent for a telephone transmitter used by the Bell telephone system
  • 1915: First U.S. coast-to-coast long-distance telephone call, facilitated by a newly-invented vacuum tube amplifier, ceremoniously inaugurated by A.G. Bell in New York City and his former assistant Thomas Augustus Watson in San Francisco, California.
  • 16 January 1915: The first automatic Panel exchange was installed at the Mulberry Central Office in Newark, New Jersey; but was a semi-automatic system using non-dial telephones.
  • 25 January 1915: The first transcontinental telephone call, with Thomas Augustus Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco receiving a call from Alexander Graham Bell at 15 Dey Street in New York City.[9]
  • 1919: The first rotary dial telephones in the Bell System installed in Norfolk, Virginia. Telephones that lacked dials and touch-tone pads were no longer made by the Bell System after 1978.[citation needed]
  • 1919: AT&T conducts more than 4,000 measurements of people's heads to gauge the best dimensions of standard headsets so that callers' lips would be near the microphone when holding handsets up to their ears.[10]

1920 to 1969

1970 to 1999

2000 to 2010


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Telephone History - Invention of the Telephone

Telephone History - Invention of the Telephone
The Story:
Probably no means of communication has revolutionized the daily lives of ordinary people more than the telephone. Simply described, it is a system which converts sound, specifically the human voice, to electrical impulses of various frequencies and then back to a tone that sounds like the original voice. In 1831, Englishman Michael Faraday (1791-1867) proved that vibrations of metal could be converted to electrical impulses. This was the technological basis of the telephone, but no one actually used this system to transmit sound until 1861. In that year, Johann Philip Reis (1834-1874) in Germany is said to have built a simple apparatus that changed sound to electricity and back again to sound. A crude device, it was incapable of transmitting most frequencies, and it was never fully developed.

A practical telephone was actually invented independently by two men working in the United States, Elisha Gray and Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell. Incredibly, both men filed for a patent on their designs at the New York patent office on February 14, 1876, with Bell beating Gray by only two hours! Although Gray had built the first steel diaphragm / electromagnet receiver in 1874, he wasn’t able to master the design of a workable transmitter until after Bell had. Bell had worked tirelessly, experimenting with various types of mechanisms, while Gray had become discouraged.

According to the famous story, the first fully intelligible telephone call occurred on March 6, 1876, when Bell, in one room, called to his assistant in another room. "Come here, Watson, I want you."

Watson heard the request through a receiver connected to the transmitter that Bell had designed, and what followed after that is a history of the founding of the Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T), which grew to be the largest telephone company in the world.

The first telephone system, known as an exchange, which is a practical means of communicating between many people who have telephones, was installed in Hartford, Connecticut in 1877, and the first exchange linking two major cities was established between New York and Boston in 1883. The first exchange outside the United States was built in London in 1879. The exchange involved a group of operators working at a large switchboard. The operators would answer an incoming telephone call and connect it manually to the party being called. The first automatic telephone exchange was patented by Almon Strowger of Kansas City in 1891 and installed in 1892, but manual switchboards remained in common use until the middle of the twentieth century.

The coin operated pay telephone was patented by William Gray of Hartford in 1889. The first rotary dial telephone was developed in 1923 by Antoine Barnay in France. The mobile telephone was invented by Bell Telephone Company and introduced into New York City police cars in 1924. Although the first commercial mobile telephone service became available in St. Louis, Missouri in 1946, the mobile telephone would not become common for another four decades.

The first touch-tone system - which used tones in the voice frequency range rather than pulses generated by rotary dials - was installed in Baltimore, MD, in 1941. Operators in a central switching office pushed the buttons; it was much too expensive for general use. However, the Bell System was intrigued by touch-tone because it increased the speed of dialing.

By the early 1960s, low-cost transistors and associated circuit components made the introduction of touch-tone into home telephones possible. Extensive human factors tests determined the position of the buttons to limit errors and increase dialing speed even further. The first commercial touch-tone phones were a big hit in their preview at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

The first Picturephone test system, built in 1956, was crude—it transmitted an image only once every two seconds. But by 1964 a complete experimental system, the "Mod 1," had been developed. To test it, the public was invited to place calls between special exhibits at Disneyland and the New York World’s Fair. In both locations, visitors were carefully interviewed afterward by a market research agency.

People, it turned out, didn’t like Picturephone. The equipment was too bulky, the controls too unfriendly, and the picture too small. But the Bell System was convinced that Picturephone was viable. Trials went on for six more years. In 1970, commercial Picturephone service debuted in downtown Pittsburgh and AT&T executives confidently predicted that a million Picturephone sets would be in use by 1980.

What happened? Despite its improvements, Picturephone was still big, expensive, and uncomfortably intrusive. It was only two decades later, with improvements in speed, resolution, miniaturization, and the incorporation of Picturephone into another piece of desktop equipment, the computer, that the promise of a personal video communication system was realized.

In 1978, American Telephone and Telegraph’s (AT&T) Bell Laboratories began testing a mobile telephone system based on hexagonal geographical regions called cells. As the caller’s vehicle passed from one cell to another, an automatic switching system would transfer the telephone call to another cell without interruption. The cellular telephone system began nationwide usage in the United States in 1983.

The actual history of the telephone is a subject of complex dispute. The controversy began with the success of the invention and continues today. Some of the inventors credited with inventing the telephone include Antonio Meucci, Philip Reis, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell.

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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003
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1901
2010
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003
Sir Peter Mansfield
Paul C. Lauterbur
Prize category:

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003

Paul C. Lauterbur, Sir Peter Mansfield

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003

Nobel Prize Award Ceremony

Paul C. Lauterbur

Paul C. Lauterbur

Sir Peter Mansfield

Sir Peter Mansfield
Paul C. Lauterbur
Sir Peter Mansfield

Paul C. Lauterbur

Sir Peter Mansfield

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003 was awarded jointly to Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield "for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging"

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