Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The History of the Telephone
The history of the telephone is ambiguous. In the United States, Al-
exander Graham Bell patented the first telephone in 1876, and he
is widely regarded as the inventor of the telephone. But, in fact,
about half a dozen other people also claim to have invented the tele-
phone: Elisha Gray from the United States, Antonio Meucci from
Italy, and Johan Philip Reis from Germany also built telephones or
telephone-like devices at roughly the same time as Bell. However,
patents tend to win out, and Bell was indeed the first to patent the
telephone.
But a phone by itself has little social value. It is necessary to be
able to connect a subscriber's phone to those of other subscribers.
Therefore, telephone switching is a critical component of modern
telephone networks.
A Hungarian engineer named Tivadar Puskas seemed to origin-
ate the idea of a telephone switchboard while he worked for Tho-
mas Edison on a telegraph exchange. The world's first commercial
telephone exchange opened on January 28, 1878, in New Haven,
Connecticut, with 21 subscribers. For more than ten years, manual
switching of telephone lines by live operators would be the norm.
The first electromechanical telephone switch, called the “step-
ping switch,” was invented in 1891 in Kansas City, Missouri, by
Almon Brown Stowger. What is interesting is that he was not work-
ing in the telecommunications field but was in fact an undertaker
who ran a funeral parlor.
The reason that Stowger was interested in a better method of
routing calls is because the wife of the owner of another funeral
parlor happened to be the town's telephone operator. Stowger was
losing business when people tried to call his company because
some of the calls would be connected to the other funeral parlor.
The idea of automated telephone switching was sufficiently im-
portant that Stowger and various friends and relatives founded the
Stowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company. Its first switch
was installed in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892 and had 75 subscribers.
It is of considerable social interest that one of the world's largest
Search WWH ::
Custom Search