The Victorian Era

Who Invented the Telephone

Article · Science & Invention · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The telephone was one of the most consequential inventions of the Victorian era, transforming the speed at which humans could communicate across distance. The invention is most often credited to Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born speech teacher who patented the device at the United States Patent Office on 14 February 1876, and who spoke the first intelligible sentence into the device three days later. Bell’s patent was disputed by Elisha Gray, who filed a caveat on the same day, and was later challenged by Antonio Meucci, who had demonstrated a voice-conveying device as early as 1860. The first practical telephones, however, depended on the carbon-pencil microphone of David Edward Hughes (1878) and the carbon-granule transmitter developed by Western Electric in the 1880s, without which the device would have remained a laboratory curiosity. The story of the telephone is part of the wider web of Victorian invention covered in Victorian Inventions.

Bell’s Path to the Patent

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh in 1847, the son of Alexander Melville Bell, a phonetician who had developed Visible Speech, a system of symbols representing every sound made by the human voice. The family moved to Brantford, Ontario, in 1870, and then to Boston, where Bell took up a position at the Boston School for the Deaf. By 1874 Bell was working on the harmonic telegraph, a device intended to send multiple telegraph messages simultaneously over a single wire by using different acoustic frequencies, and the project was financed by the Boston electrician Thomas Sanders and the wealthy Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who would become Bell’s father-in-law. The mechanical tuning forks that Bell designed for the harmonic telegraph had an unexpected consequence: when a current was interrupted by a reed, Bell could hear the sound at the far end of the wire, and on 2 June 1875, the receiver in his Boston attic produced a sound that Bell could not account for. He sketched it in his notebook and asked Thomas Watson, the young electrical engineer who was his assistant, to reproduce it.

On 14 February 1876, Bell filed his patent application for the telephone at the United States Patent Office, just hours before a similar caveat was filed by Elisha Gray, a Chicago inventor who had arrived at a design for a liquid-based variable-resistance transmitter. The patent, number 174,465, was granted on 7 March 1876, covering “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically”. Three days later, on 10 March 1876, Bell spoke into the device while Watson listened in the next room: “Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.” Whether this utterance counts as the first intelligible human transmission by telephone is debated, but it became the founding myth of the Bell Telephone Company, incorporated in July 1877, and of the British Empire in the Victorian Era, in which British post offices and cable companies would soon operate their own telephone networks.

Rivals and Co-inventors

The history of the telephone is not the history of a single man. Elisha Gray had filed a caveat, a notice of intention to patent, on the same day as Bell’s application, and the legal dispute ran for nearly two decades. Antonio Meucci, an Italian-American inventor living in Staten Island, had demonstrated a voice-conveying device he called the teletrofono as early as 1860, and he had filed a patent caveat in 1871, but he could not afford the $10 fee to renew it. In 2002, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution acknowledging Meucci’s prior work, although Bell’s priority in the United States was not overturned.

The telephone as a practical device owed as much to the rivals of Bell as to Bell himself. David Edward Hughes, an Anglo-American inventor working in London, produced a microphone and a working telephone in 1878 using a loose carbon pencil as a variable-resistance element. Hughes’s microphone, which he demonstrated to the Royal Society on 9 May 1878, was the basis of the carbon-granule transmitter that would dominate telephony for nearly a century. Thomas Edison, working independently, patented a carbon-button transmitter in 1877 that improved on Bell’s design. The Western Electric Manufacturing Company, set up in Chicago in 1869 to manufacture Bell’s equipment, developed the carbon-granule transmitter in 1886, and it was the Western Electric instrument, with its dependable variable-resistance transmitter, that finally made the telephone a practical proposition for the world. The combination of Hughes’s microphone, the Western Electric transmitter, and Bell’s electromagnetic receiver produced the modern telephone, and the contributions of these rivals must be weighed alongside Bell’s own pioneering work.

The Telephone in Britain

The first British telephone exchange opened in London on 12 November 1879, with eight subscribers in the City. The system was licensed to the Bell Telephone Company of London, and the first provincial British telephone exchange opened at Darlington on 8 February 1881, only a few months after the Canadian town of Hamilton, Ontario, had the world’s first telephone exchange on 28 January 1882. By 1880, the Postmaster General had acquired the trunk telephone system, and the Telegraph Act of 1884 gave the GPO a complete monopoly of the trunk telephone service. The first trunk line, linking London and Brighton, opened in 1888, and the post office started to license private companies to operate local telephone exchanges in competition with the GPO in 1896, an arrangement later formalised as the National Telephone Company. By 1900, there were over 200,000 telephone subscribers in the United Kingdom, almost all served by the GPO or the National Telephone Company.

The first long-distance telephone call in the world was made on 9 May 1884, between Boston and New York. The first transatlantic telephone call was made on 7 January 1927, well after the Victorian period had ended. The transatlantic telegraph cable of 1866 had been a Victorian achievement, but the transatlantic telephone was a twentieth-century feat, requiring the radio technology of the 1920s and the coaxial cable of the 1950s.

The Social Impact of the Telephone

The telephone transformed the social life of the late Victorian period. In the 1880s, the telephone was a business instrument used chiefly by banks, stockbrokers, newspapers, and large retailers. By the 1890s, it was beginning to be adopted by the middle classes, particularly by doctors, who needed to be reached in emergencies, and by tradesmen, who could call for stock. The social life of the How did the middle class grow in the Victorian era? increasingly depended on the new instrument. The telephone’s role in emergencies was dramatised in popular fiction; the Sensation Novel of the 1860s and 1870s had already trained readers to expect the intrusion of modern technology into private life, and the telephone became a stock dramatic device in plays and stories of the 1890s.

The telephone also had darker uses. The newspapers of Fleet Street, where the new device was adopted early, used the telephone to file copy from the magistrates’ courts and the police stations, and the Whitechapel murders of 1888 were reported by telephone by the press to their suburban offices. The Metropolitan Police adopted the telephone only gradually, and the first police call boxes, the precursors of the famous blue boxes of the twentieth century, did not appear in London until 1891. The telephone became, by the end of the century, the third great Victorian revolution in communication, after the electric telegraph of the 1840s and the What was the impact of penny postage? of 1840.