telephone: Quick Facts

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Facts

Also Known As	telephony

Photos and Videos

Alexander Graham Bell sits at a desk speaking into an early telephone, surrounded by a crowd of men observing the event in a formal room.

Alexander Graham Bell demonstrating the telephone

A man in period clothing speaks into an early telephone device in a black-and-white dramatization of Alexander Graham Bell's first successful telephone call.

telephone c. 2000

Alexander Graham Bell's 1876 sketch of an early telephone design, showing a man speaking into a large cone connected to a device, with handwritten notes below.

Engraving of Alexander Graham Bell seated at a table filing his telephone patent with an official; Bell's early telephone device rests on a separate table to the right.

Alexander Graham Bell

first commercial telephone

AT&T magneto wall telephone

Portrait of Alexander Graham Bell with an early telephone device positioned in front of him, symbolizing the first telephone call in history.

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Topics

ringer telephone box E1A handset switch hook anti-sidetone circuit mobile telephone cordless telephone call-number dialing loading coil repeater television Internet broadcasting radio technology satellite communication telegraph texting wireless communications broadband technology jamming

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Key People

Watch a silent short of Thomas Edison, who invented the phonograph and incandescent electric light

Thomas Edison

American inventor

Portrait of Alexander Graham Bell with white hair and beard, wearing a suit and patterned tie, looking directly at the camera.

Alexander Graham Bell

British-American inventor

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Johann Philipp Reis

German physicist

Thomas Augustus Watson, 1902

Thomas Augustus Watson

American industrialist

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Frank Baldwin Jewett

American engineer and executive

Berliner, Emil

Emil Berliner

German-born American inventor

Elisha Gray

Elisha Gray

American inventor

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Sir William Henry Preece

British engineer

Pupin, detail of a portrait

Mihajlo Pupin

Serbian American physicist

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Harold DeForest Arnold

American physicist

Thumbnail for 'Which Came First' Quiz. Composite image. Left is Glass bottle of ketchup, right is a Glass bottle containing white sauce. Sauce, food, condiment

The Dating Game: Which Came First? Vol. 3

ornithopter. Airplane and Aircraft. 3D illustration of Leonardo da Vinci's plans for an ornithopter, a flying machine kept aloft by the beating of its wings; about 1490.

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