 As with many
innovations, the idea for the telephone came along far
sooner than it was brought to reality. While Italian
innovator Antonio Meucci (pictured at left) is credited
with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and
Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854,
Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the
device in 1876. Bell began his research in 1874 and had
financial backers who gave him the best business plan
for bringing it to market.
In 1877-78, the first telephone
line was constructed, the first switchboard was created
and the first telephone exchange was in operation.
Three years later, almost 49,000 telephones were in
use. In 1880, Bell (in the photo below) merged this
company with others to form the American Bell Telephone
Company and in 1885 American Telegraph and Telephone
Company (AT&T) was formed; it dominated telephone
communications for the next century. At one point in
time, Bell System employees purposely denigrated the
U.S. telephone system to drive down stock prices of all
phone companies and thus make it easier for Bell to
acquire smaller competitors.  By 1900 there
were nearly 600,000 phones in Bell's telephone
system; that number shot up to 2.2 million phones by
1905, and 5.8 million by 1910. In 1915 the
transcontinental telephone line began operating. By
1907, AT&T had a near monopoly on phone and
telegraph service, thanks to its purchase of Western
Union. Its president, Theodore Vail, urged at the time
that a monopoly could most efficiently operate the
nation's far-flung communications network. At the
urging of the public and AT&T competitors, the
government began to investigate the company for
anti-trust violations, thus forcing the 1913 Kingsbury
Commitment, an agreement between AT&T vice
president Nathan Kingsbury and the office of the U.S.
Attorney General. Under this commitment, AT&T
agreed to divest itself of Western Union and provide
long-distance services to independent phone
exchanges.
During World War I, the
government nationalized telephone and telegraph lines
in the United States from June 1918 to July 1919, when,
after a joint resolution of Congress, President Wilson
issued an order putting them under the direction of the
U.S. Post Office. A year later, the systems were
returned to private ownership, AT&T resumed its
monopolistic hold, and by 1934 the government again
acted, this time agreeing to allow it to operate as a
"regulated monopoly" under the jurisdiction
of the FCC. Public utility commissions in
state and local jurisdictions were appointed regulators
of AT&T and the nation's independent phone
companies, while the FCC regulated long-distance
services conducted across state lines. They set the
rates the phone companies could charge and determined
what services and equipment each could offer. This
stayed in effect until AT&T's forced
divestiture in 1984, the conclusion of a U.S.
Department of Justice anti-trust suit that had been
filed in 1974. The all-powerful company had become
popularly known and disparaged as "Ma Bell."
AT&T's local operations were divided into seven
independent Regional Bell Operating Companies, known as
the "Baby Bells." AT&T became a
long-distance-services company. By 1948, the 30 millionth phone
was connected in the United States; by the 1960s, there
were more than 80 million phone hookups in the U.S. and
160 million in the world; by 1980, there were more than
175 million telephone subscriber lines in the U.S. In
1993, the first digital cellular network went online in
Orlando, Florida; by 1995 there were 25 million
cellular phone subscribers, and that number exploded at
the turn of the century, with digital cellular phone
service expected to replace land-line phones for most
U.S. customers by as early as 2010.
 Within 50 years
of its invention, the telephone had become an
indispensable tool in the United States. In the late
19th century, people raved about the telephone's
positive aspects and ranted about what they anticipated
would be negatives. Their key points, recorded by
Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book "Forecasting
the Telephone," mirror nearly precisely what was
later predicted about the impact of the
internet.
For example, people said the
telephone would: help further democracy; be a tool for
grassroots organizers; lead to additional advances in
networked communications; allow social
decentralization, resulting in a movement out of cities
and more flexible work arrangements; change marketing
and politics; alter the ways in which wars are fought;
cause the postal service to lose business; open up new
job opportunities; allow more public feedback; make the
world smaller, increasing contact between peoples of
all nations and thus fostering world peace; increase
crime and aid criminals; be an aid for physicians,
police, fire, and emergency workers; be a valuable tool
for journalists; bring people closer together,
decreasing loneliness and building new communities;
inspire a decline in the art of writing; have an impact
on language patterns and introduce new words; and
someday lead to an advanced form of the transmission of
intelligence. Privacy was also a major concern.
As is the case with the Internet, the telephone worked
to improve privacy while simultaneously leaving people
open to invasions of their privacy. In the beginning
days of the telephone, people would often have to
journey to the local general store or some other
central point to be able to make and receive calls.
Most homes weren't wired together, and
eavesdroppers could hear you conduct your personal
business as you used a public phone. Switchboard
operators who connected the calls would also regularly
invade people's privacy. The early house-to-house
phone systems were often "party lines" on
which a number of families would receive calls, and
others were free to listen in and often chose to do
so. Today, while most homes are wired
and people can travel freely, conducting their phone
conversations wirelessly, wiretapping and other
surveillance methods can be utilized to listen in on
their private business. People's privacy can also
be interrupted by unwanted phone calls from
telemarketers and others who wish to profit in some way
- just as Internet e-mail accounts receive unwanted
sales pitches, known as "spam." Yet, the invention of the
telephone also worked to increase privacy in many ways.
It permitted people to exchange information without
having to put it in writing, and a call on the phone
came to replace such intrusions on domestic seclusion
as unexpected visits from relatives or neighbors and
the pushy patter of door-to-door salesmen. The same
could be said for the Internet - privacy has been
enhanced in some ways because e-mail and instant
messaging have reduced the frequency of the jangling
interruptions previously dished out by our
telephones.
President Rutherford B. Hayes to
Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 on viewing the telephone
for the first time: “That’s an
amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one
of them?” Bell offered to sell his
telephone patent to Western Union for $100,000 in 1876,
when he was struggling with the business. An account
that is believed by some to be apocryphal, but still
recounted in many telephone histories states that the
committee appointed to investigate the offer filed the
following report:  "We do
not see that this device will be ever capable of
sending recognizable speech over a distance of several
miles. Messer Hubbard and Bell want to install one of
their 'telephone devices' in every city. The
idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why
would any person want to use this ungainly and
impractical device when he can send a messenger to the
telegraph office and have a clear written message sent
to any large city in the United States? … Mr.
G.G. Hubbard's fanciful predictions, while they
sound rosy, are based on wild-eyed imagination and lack
of understanding of the technical and economic facts of
the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious
limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a
toy ... This device is inherently of no use to us. We
do not recommend its purchase."
As reported in the book
"Bell" by Robert V. Bruce, Kate Field, a
British reporter who knew Bell, predicted in 1878 that
eventually: "While two persons,
hundreds of miles apart, are talking together, they
will actually see each other." Sir William Preece, chief
engineer for the British Post Office, 1878, as reported
in "The Telephone in a Changing World" by
Marion May Dilts: "There are conditions in
America which necessitate the use of such instruments
more than here. Here we have a superabundance of
messengers, errand boys and things of that kind
… The absence of servants has compelled America
to adopt communications systems for domestic
purposes." AT&T chief engineer and
Electrical Review writer John J. Carty projected in his
"Prophets Column" in 1891: "A system of telephony
without wires seems one of the interesting
possibilities, and the distance on the earth through
which it is possible to speak is theoretically limited
only by the curvation of the earth." Carty also wrote: "Someday we will build
up a world telephone system, making necessary to all
peoples the use of a common language or common
understanding of languages, which will join all the
people of the earth into one brotherhood. There will be
heard throughout the earth a great voice coming out of
the ether which will proclaim, 'Peace on earth,
good will towards men.'" In the 1912 article "The
Future Home Theatre" in The Independent, S.C.
Gilfillan wrote: "There are two
mechanical contrivances … each of which bears in
itself the power to revolutionize entertainment, doing
for it what the printing press did for books. They are
the talking motion picture and the electric vision
apparatus with telephone. Either one will enable
millions of people to see and hear the same performance
simultaneously .. or successively from kinetoscope and
phonographic records … These inventions will
become cheap enough to be … in every home
… You will have the home theatre of 1930, oh ye
of little faith."
View history of other
information technologies: <Telegraph><Radio><Telephone><Television> <Internet>
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