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Oct 9 2014

1st Two Way Phone Conversation

Posted byKari KozakPosted inUncategorized

In this day in 1876, Alexander Bell demonstrated the first two way telephone conversation over outdoor wires. (October 9, 1876)

Timeline of the Telephone:

  • 1667: Robert Hooke created an acoustic string telephone that convey sound over a taut extended wire by mechanical vibrations.
  • 1849: Antonio Meucci demonstrated a communicating device, it is disputed whether or not this is an electromagnetic telephone, but it is said to involve direct transmission of electricity into the users body.
  • 1861: Johann Philipp Reis of Germany managed to transfer voice electrically over a distance of 340 feet with his Reis telephone. Reis used his telephone to transmit the phrase “The horse does not eat cucumber salad.” This phrase is hard to understand acoustically in German so he used it to prove that speech can be recognized successfully at the receiving end.
  • 1871: Antonio Meucci files a patent caveat – a statement of intention to file a patent application for a Sound Telegraph. It does not describe and electromagnetic telephone.
  • 1872: Elisha Gray founds the Western Electric Manufacturing Company.
  • 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.
  • July 1874: Alexander Graham Bell first conceives the theoretical concept for the telephone while vacationing at his parents’ farm near Brantford, Canada. Alexander Melville Bell records notes of his son’s conversation in his personal journal.
  • 29 December 1874: Gray demonstrates his musical tones device and transmitted “familiar melodies through telegraph wire” at the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois.
  • 11 February 1876: Elisha Gray invents a liquid transmitter for use with a telephone, but does not build one.
  • 14 February 1876, about 9:30 am: Gray or his lawyer brings Gray’s patent caveat for the telephone to the Washington, D.C. Patent Office.
  • 14 February 1876, about 11:30 am: Bell’s lawyer brings to the same patent office Bell’s patent application for the telephone. Bell’s lawyer requests that it be registered immediately in the cash receipts blotter.
  • 14 February 1876, about 1:30 pm: Approximately two hours later Elisha Gray’s patent caveat is registered in the cash blotter. Although his caveat was not a full application, Gray could have converted it into a patent application and contest Bell’s priority, 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.
  • 7 March 1876: Bell’s U.S. Patent, No. 174,465 for the telephone is granted.
  • 10 March 1876: Bell first successfully transmits speech, saying “Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!” using a liquid transmitter as described in Gray’s caveat, and Bell’s own electromagnetic receiver.
  • 16 May 1876: Thomas Edison files first patent application for acoustic telegraphy for which U.S. 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 Brantfordand Paris, Ontario, Canada.

  • 9 October, 1876: Bell and Watson demonstrated the first two-way conversation over outdoor wires. Their call was made between Boston and Cambridge.

  • 9 July 1877: The Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint-stock company, is organized by Alexander Graham Bell’s future father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a lawyer who becomes its first president.
  • 6 October 1877: the Scientific American publishes the invention from Bell – at that time still without a ringer.
  • Early months of 1879: The Bell Telephone Company is near bankruptcy and desperate to get a transmitter to equal Edison’s carbon transmitter.
  • 19 February 1880: The photophone, also called a radiophone, is invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter at Bell’s Volta Laboratory.[15][16] The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light
  • 4 September 1884: Opening of telephone service between New York and Boston (235 miles)
  • 26 February 1914: Boston-Washington underground cable commenced commercial service
  • 25 January 1915: The first transcontinental (coast-to-coast) telephone call (3600 miles), 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, facilitated by a newly invented vacuum tube amplifier
  • 21 October 1915: First transmission of speech across the Atlantic Ocean by radiotelephone from Arlington, VA to Paris, France
  • 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.
  •  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
  • 25 April 1935: First telephone call around the world by wire and radio
  • 1947: December, W. Rae Young and Douglas H. Ring, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for provisioning of mobile telephone service.
  • 1948: Phil Porter, a Bell Labs engineer, proposed that cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas pointing in 3 directions.
  • 1955: the laying of trans-Atlantic cable TAT-1 began – 36 circuits, later increased to 48 by reducing the bandwidth from 4 kHz to 3 kHz
  • 1960′s: Bell Labs developed the electronics for cellular phones
  • 1961: Initiation of Touch-Tone service trials
  • 1970: ESS-2 electronic switch
  • 1970: Amos E. Joel, Jr. of Bell Labs invented the “call handoff” system for “cellular mobile communication system” (patent granted 1972)
  • 3 April 1973: Motorola employee Martin Cooper placed the first hand-held cell phone call to Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T’s Bell Labs, while talking on the first Motorola DynaTAC prototype.
  • 1978: Bell Labs launched a trial of the first commercial cellular network in Chicago using Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS).
  • 1982: FCC approved AT&T proposal for AMPS and allocated frequencies in the 824-894 MHz band
  • 1982: Caller ID patented by Carolyn Doughty, Bell Labs
  • 1987: ADSL introduced
  • 1988: First transatlantic fiber optic cable TAT-8, carrying 40,000 circuits
  • 1990: analog AMPS was superseded by Digital AMPS.
  • 1993: Telecom Relay Service available for the disabled
  • 11 June 2002: Antonio Meucci is recognized for “…his work in the invention of the telephone” (but not “…for inventing the telephone”) by the United States House of Representatives, in United States HRes. 269.
  • 21 June 2002: The Parliament of Canada responds by passing a motion unanimously 10 days later recognizing Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone.
  • 2005: Mink, Louisiana finally receives traditional landline telephone service (one of the last in the United States).

Books in the Engineering Library: