When Were Telephones First Used In Homes

This timeline is provided to help bear witness how the ascendant class of communication changes as quickly as innovators develop new technologies.

A cursory historical overview: The printing press was the big innovation in communications until the telegraph was developed. Press remained the key format for mass messages for years afterward, but the telegraph immune instant advice over vast distances for the first time in human history. Telegraph usage faded every bit radio became easy to use and popularized; every bit radio was being adult, the telephone quickly became the fastest style to communicate person-to-person; after television was perfected and content for it was well adult, it became the ascendant form of mass-communication technology; the internet came next, and newspapers, radio, telephones, and tv set are beingness rolled into this far-reaching data medium.

Development of the Telephone
World Changes Due to the Telephone
Telephone Predictions

The Development of the Telephone

Antonio Meucci Headshot 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 bones phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854, Alexander Graham Bell won the beginning U.South. patent for the device in 1876. Bong began his enquiry in 1874 and had fiscal 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 get-go phone exchange was in functioning. 3 years later, almost 49,000 telephones were in use. In 1880, Bell (in the photo below) merged this company with others to class the American Bell Phone Company and in 1885 American Telegraph and Telephone Visitor (AT&T) was formed; information technology dominated telephone communications for the next century. At one signal in time, Bong Organisation employees purposely denigrated the U.S. telephone system to drive down stock prices of all phone companies and thus brand information technology easier for Bell to acquire smaller competitors.

Alexander Graham Bell Using a Telephone By 1900 at that place were nearly 600,000 phones in Bong's telephone system; that number shot up to two.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 Matrimony. 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. Chaser General. Nether this commitment, AT&T agreed to divest itself of Western Union and provide long-altitude services to independent phone exchanges.

During World State of war I, the authorities nationalized telephone and telegraph lines in the United states of america from June 1918 to July 1919, when, after a joint resolution of Congress, President Wilson issued an lodge putting them under the management of the U.S. Post Role. A year later, the systems were returned to private buying, AT&T resumed its monopolistic hold, and by 1934 the authorities again acted, this fourth dimension like-minded to allow it to operate every bit 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 accuse and determined what services and equipment each could offering. This stayed in issue until AT&T's forced divestiture in 1984, the conclusion of a U.Southward. Department of Justice anti-trust suit that had been filed in 1974. The anointed company had go popularly known and disparaged as "Ma Bell." AT&T's local operations were divided into seven independent Regional Bong 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 Usa; by the 1960s, at that place were more lxxx million telephone hookups in the U.S. and 160 million in the world; by 1980, at that place were more than 175 million telephone subscriber lines in the U.S. In 1993, the offset digital cellular network went online in Orlando, Florida; by 1995 there were 25 million cellular telephone subscribers, and that number exploded at the plough of the century, with digital cellular telephone service expected to replace land-line phones for virtually U.S. customers by as early every bit 2010.

World Changes Due to the Telephone

First Prototype of a Phone Inside 50 years of its invention, the phone had go an indispensable tool in the U.s.. In the late 19th century, people raved about the phone's positive aspects and ranted almost what they predictable would be negatives. Their key points, recorded past Ithiel de Sola Pool in his 1983 book "Forecasting the Telephone," mirror near precisely what was later predicted near the touch on of the internet.

For example, people said the phone would: help farther democracy; exist 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; crusade the postal service to lose business; open upward new job opportunities; allow more public feedback; make the world smaller, increasing contact between peoples of all nations and thus fostering world peace; increment offense and aid criminals; be an assistance for physicians, police force, burn down, and emergency workers; be a valuable tool for journalists; bring people closer together, decreasing loneliness and edifice new communities; inspire a reject in the fine art of writing; have an touch on language patterns and introduce new words; and someday lead to an advanced class of the transmission of intelligence.

Privacy was too a major concern. As is the example 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 shop or another central indicate to be able to make and receive calls. Almost homes weren't wired together, and eavesdroppers could hear you conduct your personal business as you used a public telephone. Switchboard operators who connected the calls would also regularly invade people's privacy. The early on business firm-to-firm phone systems were ofttimes "party lines" on which a number of families would receive calls, and others were gratis to listen in and ofttimes chose to exercise then.

Today, while well-nigh homes are wired and people can travel freely, conducting their telephone conversations wirelessly, wiretapping and other surveillance methods can be utilized to listen in on their private business. People's privacy can too 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 every bit "spam."

Withal, the invention of the phone too worked to increase privacy in many ways. It permitted people to substitution information without having to put it in writing, and a call on the phone came to replace such intrusions on domestic seclusion equally unexpected visits from relatives or neighbors and the pushy patter of door-to-door salesmen. The same could be said for the Net – privacy has been enhanced in some ways because e-mail and instant messaging accept reduced the frequency of the jangling interruptions previously dished out past our telephones.

Past Predictions Almost the Hereafter of the Telephone

President Rutherford B. Hayes to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 on viewing the telephone for the showtime fourth dimension:

"That'due south an amazing invention, but who would ever want to employ one of them?"

Bell offered to sell his phone patent to Western Union for $100,000 in 1876, when he was struggling with the business organization. An account that is believed by some to exist apocryphal, but withal recounted in many telephone histories states that the committee appointed to investigate the offer filed the following report:

"We practice not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a altitude 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 information technology. Furthermore, why would any person desire to utilise this ungainly and impractical device when he tin can transport a messenger to the telegraph office and accept a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States? … Mr. G.G. Hubbard'south 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 inappreciably more than than a toy … This device is inherently of no use to united states. We do not recommend its buy."

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, principal engineer for the British Mail service Part, 1878, as reported in "The Telephone in a Irresolute World" by Marion May Dilts:

"There are atmospheric condition in America which necessitate the utilize of such instruments more than 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 past the curvation of the earth."

Carty besides wrote:

"Anytime we will build up a world telephone arrangement, making necessary to all peoples the apply of a common linguistic communication or common agreement of languages, which will join all the people of the world into one brotherhood. There will be heard throughout the earth a cracking voice coming out of the ether which will proclaim, 'Peace on world, skilful will towards men.'"

In the 1912 article "The Future Domicile Theatre" in The Contained, S.C. Gilfillan wrote:

"There are ii mechanical contrivances … each of which bears in itself the power to revolutionize entertainment, doing for it what the printing printing did for books. They are the talking movement picture and the electric vision apparatus with telephone. Either ane will enable millions of people to see and hear the aforementioned performance simultaneously .. or successively from kinetoscope and phonographic records … These inventions will become cheap enough to be … in every abode … You will take the domicile theatre of 1930, oh ye of niggling faith."

View history of other information technologies: