The Invention of the Telephone

Podcast Transcript

The 19th century was one of rapid technological advancement.

Of all of the innovations to come out of this century, and there were many, perhaps none was more important than that of the telephone.

The telephone radically changed communications, allowing personal communications over long distances.

Despite what many people are often told, this invention wasn’t simply the genius of one man, but was rather something developed over decades.

Learn more about the invention of the telephone and the controversial story surrounding it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

This episode is one of those that turned out to be very different coming out from what I thought it would be going in.

I was going to do a comprehensive overview of the telephone as a technology and how it evolved and changed over time. The invention of the telephone would of course be an important part of that story.

What I didn’t realize was how different the invention of the telephone was from the story I always heard growing up.

The basic story I was told was probably very similar to the one that you might have heard: the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.

To be sure, he is a part of that story, but he didn’t invent the telephone in a vacuum, and to some people, he didn’t invent it at all.

Before discussing the telephone directly, it’s important to understand the foundation upon which it was built. Long-distance communication had been a challenge humans sought to solve for centuries.

In ancient civilizations, communication systems like smoke signals, drum beats, and messenger services allowed limited information exchange, however, for the most part, information could only travel as fast as a horse could run.

By the 1790s, optical telegraph systems using semaphore signals emerged in France and elsewhere, creating the first telecommunications networks.

One of these early systems in France was known as the Chappe Telegraph, which was a system of towers several kilometers apart, which used semaphore to send messages to each other.

The first person to think about communications along a wire was the English physicist and biologist Robert Hooke, who in 1667 demonstrated that sound could travel along a wire.

What he demonstrated wasn’t a modern telephone, but rather the principal behind a tin can telephone that you might have played with as a kid.

The invention which made the telephone possible and got people thinking of using electrical signals along wires to transmit voices was, of course, the telegraph.

The telegraph was a revolutionary technology, which I covered in a previous episode. Its development got people thinking that if you can send electrical pulses down a wire, then maybe you could do the same thing with sound.

Perhaps the first person who conceptually proposed such a system was the French engineer Charles Bourseul. In 1854, he figured out what such a system would look like to convert sound to electrical signals, but he never built anything.

In 1856, the Italian/American inventor Antonio Meucci created an early working telephone prototype, which he called the “telettrofono.” He made it primarily to communicate with his bedridden wife from his workshop. He demonstrated his invention multiple times and in 1871 filed a patent caveat, a preliminary notice of intent to file a full patent, for his voice communication device. However, financial difficulties prevented him from securing a full patent, and his work was largely overshadowed.

In 1861, the German inventor Johann Philipp Reis established his claim to fame by creating the first device to carry the name telephone. He built an early telephone prototype capable of transmitting sound using electrical signals. His device, known as the “Reis Telephone,” used a diaphragm that responded to sound waves and a make-and-break circuit to convert these vibrations into electrical impulses.

However, Reis’s telephone was primarily successful in transmitting musical tones and some speech sounds, but it struggled with continuous and clear speech transmission.

Famously, the first audible words he was able to transmit over his system were: “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat”, which translated into English means, “The horse doesn’t eat cucumber salad”.

The phrase was chosen because of its difficulty in being able to be heard clearly in German.

Reis did not pursue commercial development, never filed for a patent, and his work remained relatively obscure outside of Germany.

I should note that I haven’t even gotten to Alexander Graham Bell yet and there have already been several telephone phototypes. Just like with the electric incandescent lightbulb, the development of the telephone didn’t come out of nowhere.

By the 1870s, many people were working on the problem of sending speech over wires via electrical signals, including Bell, as well as Thomas Edison, and the founder of Western Electric, Elisha Gray.

Alexander Graham Bell’s path to the telephone began through his work with the deaf. Born in Scotland in 1847, Bell came from a family deeply involved with elocution and speech education. His father developed “Visible Speech,” a phonetic system to help the deaf learn to speak.

After moving to Canada and then the United States, Bell became interested in transmitting speech electrically while teaching deaf students. His knowledge of acoustics and speech mechanics proved invaluable. He began experiments with Thomas Watson, a skilled electrical designer, as his assistant.

Bell pursued the concept of “undulating current”—a continuous electrical current that varied in intensity like sound waves—rather than the make-and-break approach others had tried. This fundamental insight would prove crucial.

On March 10, 1876, Bell famously succeeded when he spilled acid on himself and called to Watson in the next room through his experimental device: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Watson heard the words clearly through the receiver, marking the supposedly first documented transmission of intelligible human speech via electricity….ignoring the horses not eating cucumber salad.

That is the textbook description of Bell’s invention of the telephone. However, there is more to the story.

The other part of the story involves the previously mentioned Elisha Gray.

Gray co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, which became a major player in electrical communications.

During the early 1870s, Gray worked on harmonic telegraphy, a system that allowed multiple messages to be sent over a single telegraph wire using different tones. By the mid-1870s he had over 30 patents related to telegraph technology.

Gray’s path to telephone development began with his work on the “musical telegraph” in the early 1870s. This device used electromagnets to create electrical oscillations at different audio frequencies.

During his work on the musical telegraph, Gray discovered that he could control the sounds produced by electrical circuits. This led him to realize that variable resistance (rather than make-and-break circuits) would be key to transmitting voice.

Around 1874, Gray began experimenting with methods to transmit vocal sounds electrically.

He developed a liquid transmitter design that used water with an electrical contact that could be immersed to varying depths by sound vibrations.

The liquid transmitter is really the key to the entire story.

The liquid transmitter was a revolutionary idea.

A diaphragm or a membrane, consisting of a thin, flexible material, was placed over a chamber.

A needle or conducting rod was attached to the diaphragm and dipped into a container filled with a conductive liquid such as water mixed with acid or salt to improve conductivity.

When sound waves hit the diaphragm, it vibrated in response to the voice.

The needle moved up and down in the liquid changing the depth of immersion, which in turn varied the electrical resistance in the circuit.

These changes in resistance were converted into electrical signals, which were then sent through wires to a receiver.

A similar mechanism at the receiving end reconverted the electrical signals back into sound.

Here is where the controversy comes into play.

On February 14, 1876, Gray filed a patent caveat, a notice of intent to file a patent, describing a telephone design using a water transmitter.

Remarkably, Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent application for the telephone on the exact same day.

This was several weeks before the famous “Watson Come here I want you”, meaning Bell hadn’t yet actually yet developed a working prototype when he filed his patent.

The controversy centers on several key points:

Bell’s lawyer filed his patent application just hours before Gray filed his caveat. This narrow time difference has raised questions about whether Bell had legitimate priority.

Gray’s caveat described a liquid transmitter design using variable resistance. Bell’s original patent didn’t contain this specific design.

Here is where it gets really fishy…..

The patent examiner at the patent office who handled both applications was Zenas Fisk Wilber.

Years later, when this entire issue was brought out in court, Wilber testified that he was an alcoholic and owed money to his friend who he served with in the Civil War, Marcellus Bailey.

Who was Marcellus Bailey?

The attorney for Alexander Graham Bell.

On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was officially granted patent number 174,465. The patent was issued for “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically…by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound.”

Three days later, Bell makes the famous “Watson Come here I want you” transmission and he did it using……a liquid transmitter.

There was a lot more that was fishy about the entire process.

On February 19th, Bell’s patent application was suspended for three months because of the two similar patents that were submitted on the same day. This was not unusual as the patent office would normally conduct an investigation to see which invention was developed first.

It was also not uncommon at the time for patent applications to take years with public hearings.

So the awarding of Bell’s patent so quickly was highly unusual.

Moreover, in another highly unusual move, Bell later testified that he had spoken to Zenas Wilber about Elisha’s Greys patent, which may be how he got the idea of the liquid transmitter.

To be fair, Grey and Bell knew about each other years before they both filed their patents and were vaguely aware that they were both working on the problem of the telephone.

Each was concerned that the other might have been spying on them.

However, the very odd circumstances surrounding the issuing of the patent have, for almost 150 years, led some people to think that Bell stole the idea of the telephone from Grey, and if he didn’t steal it, he used some questionable methods to get his patent approved.

Why is this so important?

Part of this is just a matter of giving credit to the right people. I’m guessing most of you who have heard of Alexander Graham Bell have never heard of Elisha Grey.

However, the much bigger issue had to do with money.

Patent number 174,465 has been called the most valuable patent in history.

Alexander Graham Bell and his father-in-law went on to form the Bell Telephone Company which was created to be a holding company for the Bell patents.

It later became the American Telephone and Telegraph company, which you might know better as AT&T.

AT&T had a monopoly over the entire telephone system in the United States until it was broken up in the 1980s. Until its break up, it was the world’s largest company with over one million employees.

The liquid transmitter didn’t actually play much of a role in the development of the telephone. In 1877, Bell was granted patent number 186,787 for a telephone using a permanent magnet.

There were over 600 lawsuits challenging Bell’s patents. The Bell Telephone Company won most cases, including a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1888 that upheld Bell’s patents despite the controversies.

By the time the Bell patent expired, they had a huge advantage in the market and purchased most of the small telephone companies that sprung up. They also ended up buying Western Electric, Elisha Grey’s company.

There is a lot more to the story of the telephone. The telephone itself was only one part of a much larger, more complex system that eventually spanned the entire world.

While Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the patent and is largely given credit for the invention of the telephone, he was only one of many people who helped develop the technology that made the telephone possible.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

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